When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind within this “intriguingly dark, twisty” (Kirkus Reviews) debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.

Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain view. A clerk at the Bright Tips bookstore, she retains a meticulously crafted lifetime among her beloved books, eccentric co-workers, as well as the BookFrogs-the dropped and lonesome regulars who spend every day marauding the store’s confused shelves..READING MORE about Midnight at the Bright Suggestions Bookstore: A Novel

But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore’s upper area, Lydia’s life shows up unglued. Often Joey’s preferred bookseller, Lydia continues to be bequeathed his meager worldly belongings. Trinkets and books; the detritus of the lonely, uncared for man. But when Lydia flips through his books she discovers them defaced with techniques both troubling and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man within the verge of the emotional reckoning. Plus they seem to include a hidden message. What do Joey know? And what does it have regarding Lydia?

As Lydia untangles the secret of Joey’s suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her very own violent childhood. Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back. Her faraway father returns towards the collapse, along with an obsessive local cop, and the Hammerman, a murderer who arrived to Lydia’s life long ago and, as she shortly discovers, never totally left. “Both alluring and demanding” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review), Midnight in the Bright Tips Bookstore is normally a “multi-generational story of abandonment, desperation, and betrayal…inventive and intricately plotted” (Web publishers Weekly, starred review).