Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

April 10, 2017
Sullivan’s solid first novel opens with 30-year-old bookseller Lydia Smith finding the corpse of Joseph Molina hanging from a beam in Denver’s Bright Ideas Bookstore. The lonely 20-something ex-con spent countless hours wandering the shop, but Lydia can’t fathom why he chose to commit suicide there—or why he died with a photograph of Lydia’s 10th birthday party in his pocket. Her confusion grows when she inherits Joey’s belongings and discovers coded messages addressed to her hidden inside his books. Lydia’s efforts to answer the questions surrounding Joey’s death uncover clues to a cold case from her own past—a household massacre that only Lydia survived. Flashbacks to Lydia’s childhood told from her father’s perspective help build the tension. Quirky characters and a keen sense of place distinguish this multigenerational tale of abandonment, desperation, and betrayal. Sullivan’s writing occasionally calls too much attention to itself and a surfeit of coincidence strains credulity, but this inventive and intricately plotted mystery still largely satisfies. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit.

October 1, 2017

Lydia and Raj were childhood best friends. Then Carol--who, at ten, was already an established troublemaker--makes Raj a third wheel, at least until she's brutally murdered with her parents. Lydia, in the house that night for a sleepover, survives by hiding under the kitchen sink. Two decades later, Lydia faces another horrific death--the suicide of one of the regular patrons of the Bright Ideas Bookstore, where she's been working. Lydia is the first to find Joey's body; in his pocket, she discovers a photo from her tenth birthday, which also happens to include Raj and Carol. How it got there is a mystery Lydia must solve--even at the cost of shattering her quiet, carefully controlled existence. Her answers come in books--Joey's books, in which he's left desperate, complicated cutout messages to be meticulously, ingeniously solved. Narrator Madeleine Maby replicates Lydia's restrained, even eerie calm, enabling the tension of must-know whodunit and whydunit to build expertly as didn't-see-that-coming layer after layer is revealed. VERDICT Maby's adroit narration provides Sullivan's debut quite the aural boost. ["Though darker than other beloved novels set in bookstores, this story will appeal to fans of Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and Katarina Bivald's The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend": LJ 5/1/17 review of the Scribner hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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