Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan

[Scribner] When a beloved bookstore patron dies by suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this award-winning debut novel that is at once “shocking, charming, [and] thrilling” (Associated Press). Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she leads a meticulously ordered existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day browsing the overwhelmed stacks. But when a young BookFrog, Joey Molina, hangs himself in one of the upper rooms of the store, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Inside one of Joey’s pockets is a photograph of Lydia as a little girl. And when she flips through some of 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. The more she goes over them, the more they seem to contain a hidden message for her about his fi