num_pages: 328
description: When a bookshop patron commits suicide his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind. Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books eccentric colleagues and the BookFrogs.....the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the stores overwhelmed shelves. But when Joey Molina a young beguiling BookFrog kills himself in the bookstores upper room Lydias life comes unglued. Always Joeys favorite bookseller Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely uncared for man. But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. And they seem to contain a hidden message. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia? As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joeys suicide she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood. Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back. Her distant father returns to the fold along with an obsessive local cop and the Hammerman a murderer who came into Lydias life long ago and as she soon discovers never completely left.
language: English
title: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
publisher: Scribner