Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore - Matthew Sullivan

I figured I was setting myself up for a huge disappointment when I let my enthusiasm about the cover of Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore convince me that I really needed to read this one. That’s happened to me several times before when I chose a new book based solely on what I saw on the cover – especially, it seems, with books about, or set in, bookstores (a major weakness of mine). This one, though, did not disappoint. 

Lydia Smith is a bookseller at the Bright Ideas bookstore, a young lady who truly loves books and what she does in the bookstore. And her customers love her right back - especially the BookFrogs, an eccentric group of regulars who claim the bookstore as a second home (for many of them, it’s their only home) and spend whole days there browsing or napping among the books. But when one of the BookFrogs hangs himself in the store at midnight, just before closing time, everything changes for Lydia for good. She will never, ever be the same.

Matthew Sullivan

Lydia not only discovers Joey’s body, she also learns that he has bequeathed all of his possessions – what little there are of them - to her. She already suspected that she was Joey’s favorite bookseller, but because Joey had only recently started actually speaking to her about himself a little, Lydia was taken by surprise by his gesture. What Lydia finds in Joey’s apartment is pretty much what she expects to find: lots of junk and lots of books. But when Lydia starts taking a closer look at the books in the apartment she begins to wonder what Joey was up to before his suicide. The books have been defaced in an apparently systematic way, with dozens of little windows cut into their pages, and Lydia knows that the key to what was going on in Joey’s head is hidden somewhere in the books he left behind.

Lydia has bloody secrets of her own, things about her childhood that she has shared with no one in the world, including her live-in boyfriend, David. But when she finds something from her childhood in Joey’s possession, it doesn’t make sense. Just who was Joey Molina, anyway? And does she really want to know the truth?

Bottom Line: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore satisfies on a couple of different levels. Fans of “bookstore books” will be pleased that so much of the plot takes place inside, or around the day-to-day routine of, the bookstore itself in a way that reveals lots about the quirky store and its often eccentric employees and customers. But this one is also a good mystery about a murderous rampage perpetrated by a villain so spooky that a whole generation of children would never forget him. It’s a mystery with enough solid misdirection in it that I did not solve it until the author intended me to solve it. My only gripe concerns the book’s ending (long after the mystery itself is solved), an ending that is really a little too abrupt to be much satisfying.