Not what I expected from the title at all. I thought it would a cozy read, rather than a mystery thriller. But I still enjoyed it, as both past unraveled and became unexpectedly linked.

This was a wonderful, quirky surprise, quite unlike anything else I’ve read this year. A twisty mystery thriller, packed with eccentric characters, bookish references and hidden secrets.

The Bright Ideas Bookstore has its regulars, those bookseller Lydia has affectionately named ‘Book Frogs’. Mainly men, the Book Frogs are lost and lonely, those who’ve slipped through the cracks of society and finding a peaceful refuge in the store. And they seem harmless, until Lydia finds one of them hanging from the ceiling, with an old photograph of her tenth birthday party in his pocket.

Joey was a little different, but Lydia liked having him around the store. “He was a shattered young man, Lydia often thought, haunted but harmless – a dust bunny blowing through the corners of the store.” His death shakes Lydia, but she’s drawn in deeper when she finds out he’s left the entire contents of his flat to her, including a stack of books with hidden messages which leads her on a journey into her own past.

The way Joey leaves his code in books for Lydia to find was genius, and it’s fitting that this lonely book lover uses this as his last method of communication, even from beyond the grave. “Joey’s books were Joey’s solace, so doing this, inserting himself so personally into them, may have been the only way he could profess his burdens to the world.”

As Lydia tries to get to the bottom of Joey’s suicide, she’s forced to confront her own past, including a brutal murder she witnessed when she was 13 years old by the ‘Hammerman’. But why did the Hammerman spare young Lydia? And how is Joey connected to her past? Everyone’s a suspect and everything is connected in this multi-layered tale.

I have to admit this novel wasn’t quite what I expected – I went into it expected a cosy, bookish mystery and, while I got the bookish part right, there’s nothing cosy about this story. It’s dark and heart-achingly sad in places, but there’s a quirky sense of humour and eccentricity peppered throughout which keeps the subject matter of suicide and murder from getting too intense. The writing was unique and elegant, as the author brings the threads together to tell a melancholic, atmospheric and touching story.

Not bad, just not what I was expecting, especially from the cover artwork. Was a far more straightforward crime novel.

I seriously loved this book. It was full of mystery and yet by the end, I found I had enough 'clues' that the characters did to make a guess. The story centres around not just one thing but then another and another before we're left with a snowball effect until the end is tied up perfectly. A wonderful story!

A brilliant debut mystery thriller by Matthew J. Sullivan, he is defiantly one to watch!I
I didn't expect this book to have so much dark to it and take so many unexpected twists! Suicide, murder, books and so much more!I
I honestly cannot think of a single book to compare it to, which is why I was so impressed and found it so unique.
While it may have slowed in a few spots, it was a worthy read and one I won’t soon forget.

While both plots intertwine, they took too long to actually get there, and the book itself was really boring and bland. I kept loosing interest and this sounded so great but I just didn't like it.

Lydia i didn't like her, she was boring and we had so many questions but they weren't really answered. Her relationship with David was a bit naff it didn't feel fleshed out at all and felt very pointless.

Overall, I feel like this book tried to encompass two plotlines and failed to flesh both of them out fully, resulting in an underwhelming failure to execute both. The characters were bland and boring and unable to hold attention

I thouroughly enjoyed this book. It is well written and the characters are colourful. It was well paced although the last part became a bit obvious. I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys gentle mystery stories but probably not for hardcore thriller readers.

What a fantastic book. This really kept my interest all the way through, with a mixture of thriller, mystery, suspense, sadness and most of all BOOKS!
I thought this was very well written, and not dumbing things down for the reader, which seems to be becoming more rare nowadays. Even though I had worked out quite early who was the Hammerman, I had not expected the reason so that was a fascinating surprise.
I have looked through the other reviews, most of which seem to be deducting stars because they did not check what they were buying and thought this was fantasy - however the blurb is quite accurate. I do love fantasy books, but I also thought this was great.
I received a review copy from Netgalley but that doesn't normally mean I give 5 stars! Can I give this 6?

So I actually found this book via Claire Heuston over at Art and Soul (an epic book and baking blog, see review here and, having read the blurb, was keen to get over to Netgalley to request (Thanks so much to Cornerstone and Netgalley for this book in return for an honest review!)

Now Claire’s review basically told me that it was a beautiful book, with a fabulous bookstore in it that didn’t feature quite enough, with the story moving away from this fantastic setting to investigate a murder that had happened in the protagonist, Lydia’s life. She found this to be a slight disappointment and I was slightly disappointed when she said this, but decided that maybe this element would be different for me. Unfortunately not, although it didn’t always take away from the book.

It is a book of two paths, the first, the story of Joey, who sadly committed suicide at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. His suicide fully took hold of me, his climb to his death, with the sound of fluttering pages and falling books echoing around a bookstore that oozed character adding to the intrigue as to what was going on. Joey is a Bookfrog, one of many characters that enter the bookstore solely for somewhere to be, and my heart went out to him and wished for him to be stronger, and less beaten down by life.

We meet Lydia, one of the only people in Joey’s life, without being his actual person, and we soon realise she has some monstrous skeletons in her closet. Lydia starts looking into Joey’s death, and it brings her back to her own past, as we find out the horror she had to face as a child int he presence of ‘Hammerman’. There’s a number of characters about, some lovely, some tougher. I found Lydia to be overdramatic at times, even given her circumstances, and so I sometimes struggled.

We come to know her estranged childhood friend and father, who have also been affected by the goings on of times past. Her past itself, when revealed, is tough going, not by any means the toughest I’ve read by a longshot, but you’re so immersed in it and so filled with the sensation of the darkness and being enshrouded by snow, that it was one of the more headachy reads I’ve read recently, causing me to blink a few times on finishing, as if I’d just woken up, or stepped into the light myself. The way everything was put together in the end slightly perplexed me at times, and there was some overdramaticness on Lydia’s part in relation to her father especially.

It’s a tough book to review, because I was incredulous at some things that happened in terms of coincidences, and yet was so taken by some of the storytelling, settings and beauty of it all that it made me want to make people read just so they could experience it too, in particular the opening.

Rating: 4/5

After reading some reviews prior reading this book I wasn't sure what to expect and if I will enjoy it. Well I did. I found it engaging from the first chapter and absolutely couldn't predict the ending. Exactly what you expect from this genre. I will definitely recommend it.

I don’t know how I feel about Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. I mean, on one hand, it was a definite page-turner and one that I whizzed through and almost couldn’t put down, but is that down to the fact that it was a good book, or that I’m just a nosey bugger who can’t bear not knowing the ending? I have found myself in a similar situation with many other mysteries this year - The Naturalist, Last Lullaby and My Sister’s Grave to name just a disappointing few - and I can’t say that I have come out of any of them pleased with the experience or the conclusion… Maybe I’ve just got high standards, but the mystery genre is the one in which books have to try the hardest to impress me, and a majority have fallen flat on their faces.
Going into this book, it seemingly had an advantage as instead of just including one mystery, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore slides in an additional one, focussing on both the suicide of a regular customer in the upstairs of a bookshop in present day, and the murder twenty-years ago of an entire family. Linking these seemingly-unconnected events together is our protagonist, Lydia, who is both an employee of said-bookshop and a witness and sole survivor of the murders.
While this seems that it will turn the narrative of non-stop intrigue and mystery, the book fails in making either of the mysteries particularly compelling. The suicide is more so, primarily because he eventually turns into somewhat of a fully-formed character, but I still had to force myself to continue caring. Even though I still don’t understand why people were allowed to sit in-store and read all day - it’s a bookshop, not a library! In my opinion, it’s just not a good business-model and I don’t really understand how the business is still afloat.
The other? I couldn’t care even if I wanted to. You’d think that someone killing a mother, father and their ten-year-old daughter would stir up a little empathy in me - and maybe I’m just dead inside - but only two of the three characters were given any sort of characterisation (and even then just barely), and neither of them were particularly nice people or ones that I felt anything for.
In fact, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is filled with the brim with unpleasant, awful characters and this links to a rather odd part of the book that really felt a little off to me - the way that sexual attraction was written. Throughout the novel, no matter whose point of view a particular example of aesthetic description came from, there was just an undercurrent of creepiness that came alongside of it. Honestly, I am still confused as to whether it was intentional on the writer’s part, although I am becoming more and more certain that it wasn’t - primarily because of the writing of Raj and him being a designated good character, so surely he wasn’t meant to come off as a bit of a lech? No idea.
This is primarily tied to way that men interact with, and respond to, Lydia. Even in the most inappropriate situations, every single man insists on ogling her - even a government official who begs her to go to his high school reunion with him, I mean, seriously?
Just do your job, dude.
Her boyfriend is quickly deemed irrelevant and unnecessary by the book’s narration once it establishes Lydia’s attempts to move on from the trauma of her childhood, and the book’s eyes immediately turn to wanting her to cheat on him. I mean, she’s still together with him so why is that the next logical step? To be honest, cheating is seen, by seemingly every goddamn person in this book, as the most logical and normal thing for anyone (this not being limited to just Lydia) to do. At one point, a friend sees Lydia with a man who is not her boyfriend and says something along the lines of ‘you haven’t cheated with him yet but you’re going to’…. They haven’t even spoken to him? They literally saw them together for like, two minutes? I mean, what if he was gay? Why is that never considered?
Frankly, my lasting impression from this book is, that if everyone kept their knickers on, they wouldn't have half as many problems. God, I feel like Jeremy Kyle.

WOW, what a fantastic debut mystery thriller by author Matthew J. Sullivan, he is defiantly one to watch, his writing is gripping with rich characters that you warm to in seconds. The dark plot keeps you guessing and holds you right till the very end.
I am a book lover and the thought of a book written about another book lover in a book store made me instantly want to pick it up and devour it. I was so pleased I did, because I really didn't want it to end.
Lydia is a bookseller who loves nothing more than watching people enjoy books as much as her. She lets the homeless and less fortunate find a place they feel they belong in the book store. One night, Joey, one of her "book frogs" commits suicide in the store, this throw's Lydia's world into a spiral of lies and secrets that she must get to the bottom of. Her past becomes her present and untold secrets are unfolded.
Im not going to go to much into the story as you can only feel the richness of this novel if you pick it up and read it. I can't wait to see what this author comes up with next.
For me this was 5 ++ read. I loved it!.

Sneaky sneaky .....the cover and blurb don’t give you any inclination about what is to happen when you start turning the pages....wow I loved it blew my socks off.

When a long term book frog at the Bright Ideas Bookstore commits suicide during opening hours it is down to employee Lydia to solve the mystery of why this happened.

What entails during Lydia’s investigation into the young Joeys death leads her to unravel a horrific mystery in her own past.

This read was pretty gruesome which I was not expecting and it took me by shock. However this did not deter me from finishing this novel. A really gripping story that uncovers Lydia’s own personal nightmare that has followed her through life.

Quirky bookshop fun! Perfect for booksellers and bookshop lovers. :)

I was initially drawn to this book because of the magical title and cover design. Having not read anything about this book I was expecting some kind of magical tale of hidden worlds amongst the pages of a bookstore, instead I got a well crafted and very original mystery that held my attention right until the very end. After the initial shocking start it is a little slow to get going as it introduces storylines and timelines that appear totally unrelated and disjointed but as the mystery slowly gets revealed everything starts coming together. This was a very entertaining read but I do feel the title and the cover are somewhat misleading given the theme of the book. Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for the chance to review this title.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book but when I read it I was surprised at it being more of a thriller than gentle read. For me it was more violent than I like and as I don't read books like this very often I didn't spot any of the twists coming. I can't say that the book blew my socks off, I didn't really like any of the characters and it was fun at the time but not a book that will become one of my personal favourites.

Author Matthew J. Sullivan, a bona fide Denverite, has set his debut novel in the Lower Downtown district of Denver, Colorado, and the City is as much a character in his story as the patrons (fondly known as BookFrogs) of the Bright Ideas Bookstore.

LoDo has evolved from skid row to hip and happening neighbourhood in a relatively short space of time - urban reinvestment producing a sort of cultural renaissance – and protagonist, Lydia Smith, whom I suspect is (like myself) on the autistic spectrum, finds these changes somewhat unsettling. She has worked in the book shop for a number of years and has developed a soft spot for the shabby male misfits and eccentrics whose isolated lives are made endurable only by this sanctuary among the shelves.

One BookFrog in particular, the intriguing but emotionally damaged Joey Molina, brings out Lydia's maternal instincts. However, his horrific suicide leads to a concatenation of unexpected developments involving defaced books, the reappearance of peeps from the past and the gradual disclosure of deeply buried secrets. It also forces her to confront memories of her intensely traumatic childhood – something she has endeavoured to suppress almost as much from herself as from her boyfriend and colleagues.

The plot rattles along like the Platte Valley Trolley with each fresh revelation leading to an ever more vexing question, and ciphers discovered between the pages of seemingly unrelated books - the twists and turns emerge thick and fast.

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is not a cosy or frivolous tale, more a disquieting mystery set against the background of a changing city, which should appeal to crime fiction readers and bookish literature lovers alike. It has a few rough edges, but no more so than one would expect from a first novel. In the main it is a cracking read and would make an ideal gift for a whodunnit aficionado.

Lovely, magical, witty escape from every day life. Totally heartwarming & uplifting - something everyone needs!

I absolutely loved this book. It had a clever plot which had me guessing until the very end - and I read a lot of books so that's quite something. I loved the gradual development of the story and the interplay between the characters. I also enjoyed the place descriptions of somewhere I know nothing about: it all felt very real. The thing I didn't like is the title which I thought completely short-changed the book. It's a clever, complex, quite dark story with a misleadingly cutesy title.