In a strange bit of serendipity, I finished watching Mindhunter on Netflix last night before I dove into Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. At the center of this twisty mystery is a horrific multiple murder that seems straight out of the dark heyday of the axe murders. Lydia Gladwell, now a humble bookseller at the Bright Ideas Bookstore in Denver, was the only survivor of the Hammerman. She’s been successfully hiding ever since, but a suicide in her bookstore starts to bring everything out into the open.
It takes a chapter or two for us to learn this. The opening of Midnight in the Bright Ideas Bookstore made me think that this might be another dark, quirky tale like The Stopping Place. Lydia is the favorite employee of a lot of the homeless and odder customers at Bright Ideas, including Joey, who hangs himself on the upper floor of the store. When she finds a photo of herself at her tenth birthday party plus a lot of strangely damaged books, Lydia has a mystery on her hands. Her compassion for the lonely, troubled young man leads her to pursue the messages he left, to find out why he would take his life. Then we learn about what happened the night Lydia survived the Hammerman and it’s clear that this book is not a dark but quirky tale.
Even though it only unfolds over a couple of days, the plot feels leisurely. There are plenty of red herrings and clues that turn out to mean a lot. It’s a wonderful brain teaser, especially since I binge-watched ten hours of men in a basement trying to figure out what makes serial and spree killers tick. The more I thought about the Hammerman murders, the more I was stuck trying to make it all fit. So when it all did fit, it felt hugely satisfying.
I picked up Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore because I wanted a book-based story of people with haunting backgrounds and literary clues. I didn’t find that. What I found was something equally interesting: a tangled tale of family and murder and defensive independence. I really liked this book.