Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
by Matthew J. Sullivan
Lydia Smith leads a very quiet existence, working in
the Bright Ideas Bookstore and living with her boyfriend David, until the night
that one of her favorite patrons, Joey, commits suicide by hanging himself upstairs
in the bookstore. Lydia finds him. She is traumatized and, to add to her
trouble, her picture is soon in the news and we find out that Lydia’s life has
not always been so quiet.
“But Lydia wasn’t okay. Something had been happening
inside her. An old tight knot was beginning to unravel.”
Joey has a picture on him at the time of his death. It
shows Lydia and two of her friends at her birthday party from fourth grade, Raj
Patel and Carol O’Toole. How did he get it? Lydia has not had contact with Raj
for years. Carol is dead. Lydia was hidden under the kitchen sink the night
that Carol and her parents were murdered by a hammer wielding man. The girls
weren’t supposed to be there. Lydia didn’t see much from her hiding spot and
the man who killed them was never brought to justice.
After that night, her father moved the two of them
away. He had been the town librarian but became a prison security guard. Things
did not go smoothly between Lydia and her father and she went off on her own as
soon as she was old enough to do so. Now, after seeing her in the news, her
starts contacting her again. So does Raj Patel. Also, the detective who
investigated the Hammerman case.
It turns out that Joey left everything he had at the
halfway house to her, though he burned a lot of what he had. There are messages
he left behind for her. It turns out Joey had secrets of his own, a lot of
them.
Characters, motivations, and events, mount up into a
fascinating mosaic until we find out who the Hammerman is, at last. A solid
thriller/mystery.
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