When she was the sole survivor of a mass murder, Lydia and her father move away. When Joey commits suicide, Lydia is left behind wondering what had happened to him and why did he have a photo of her when she was 10 and with the murdered girl. As she works to find out more about him, she starts to uncover secrets from her own past.
Of course my main interest for reading this was the mention of a bookstore. Although we start off within Bright Ideas Bookstore, the book takes us to multiple other places in Denver.
I enjoyed the multiple mysteries within the book. I wanted to know about the murder in Lydias childhood. Who Joey was and why did he kill himself in Bright Ideas? Why does Lydia no longer speak to her father? And Sullivan managed to answer all of them by the end.
The book jumps from past to present, and sometimes changes to someone else’s narrative apart from Lydia. I really enjoyed the time jumps as we got to see all the key moments with all the details. But some of the moments got repetitive as they were then thought about or discussed later on. Although I really liked the book, there were some parts I could skip over because it wasn’t any new information.
There’s a lot of suspense in some parts. Sullivan wonderfully wove the darker and grittier mysteries together as we neared the end. It is a slow start though, so if you do read it, remember to keep going because more questions are raised as you go on. Although, I found the ending to be really abrupt. The drama really ramped up nearing the end and then it just stopped. I wish we could have read about the aftermath a bit more.
I received Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore* by Matthew Sullivan as an e-book from the publisher via Netgalley. This is an unbiased and honest review.