
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Madeleine Maby
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By:
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Matthew Sullivan
About this listen
When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this fiendishly clever debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.
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, her eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs - the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store's overwhelmed shelves.
But when Joey McGinty, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore's back room, Lydia's life comes unglued. Always Joey's 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 Joey's 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 Lydia's life long ago and, as she soon discovers, never completely left.
Bedazzling, addictive, and wildly clever, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is a heart-pounding mystery that perfectly captures the intellect and eccentricity of the bookstore milieu and will keep you guessing until the very end.
©2017 Matthew Sullivan. All rights reserved. (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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No shopping at the Bright Ideas Bookstore for me!
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Wonderful use of words, plot a bit clunky
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Clever Storyline, ho-hum narration
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Where does Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I don't really rank books, I judge them individually and this book falls into the "Would read again" category.What did you like best about this story?
The characters were "real", believable and they grew as the story progressed. Some grew for the better, others for the worse, but they all grew, one way or the other.Have you listened to any of Madeleine Maby’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I have not, but I absolutely LOVED her and am looking to her other narrations to see if she has done anything else that I would like to read.Fantastic Story - Wonderful Narrator
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Watch Out for the Quiet One
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This author's talent is in detail
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Interesting story- well written
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Not sure what to expect but I was pulled in
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4 1/2 stars for originality
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Keeps you guessing
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