Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is not the book I thought it would be when I found it on Overdrive. But it was actually better than I was expecting!
There are two mysteries at the center of Midnight, one in the past and one in the present, that our protagonist, Lydia, finds herself struggling to solve on her own. In the present day Lydia works at a bookstore where one of her favorite patrons, an unemployed ex-con with a penchant for books named Joey, commit suicide by hanging himself. Lydia discovers the body and, before the police arrives, discovers Joey died with a photo of her and her two best friends at her tenth birthday in his pocket.
“Joey loved it here,” he said. “Loved it. This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort. He could get lost in here like nowhere else on earth. I’m telling you this, Lydia, because in all his life, he’d never really had that feeling before, not consistently anyway. Not to overstate it, but this store was the closest thing to a home that Joey ever had.”
In flashbacks we learn more about Lydia and her upbringing. She was raised by a single father, her mother died in child birth, and she struggled to make friends until she met Raj and Carol. When Lydia was ten Carol and her parents were murdered by a man with a hammer while Lydia hid under the sink. The authorities never discovered who the hammer man was so Lydia’s father took her deep into the Colorado wilderness and raised her by himself.
Now that she is an adult she has severed ties with her father and hasn’t seen Raj in years but in order to make sense of the present she is going to have to revisit the past. Minor spoiler but, like most good mysteries, Sullivan ties everything together but he does it in an unexpected but believable way. Sullivan really fleshed out his main characters, especially Lydia, and the central mysteries came together in an organic way.
I don’t want to give too much away so I will just say that I definitely recommend this one to any mystery lovers!