Buried Stuff

An avid antique collector, Jane Wheel owns a lot of stuff. In fact, she owns too much stuff, which often gets her into trouble. So finally she agrees to do the unthinkable: she holds her very first garage sale. Thankfully the sale ends almost before it begins, interrupted by a hysterical phone call from Jane's mother, Nellie. But Jane's relief doesn't last long. Nellie is calling to tell Jane about a mysterious discovery on a neighbor's property: bone fragments, buried in his backyard. Since Jane's husband, Charlie, is a geologist, Jane volunteers to make the trip to her hometown, Kankakee, Illinois, to see if they can help her parents' neighbor, Fuzzy Neilson, sort things out. When they arrive, Jane and Charlie are surprised to find quite a controversy brewing in town, and not just over the mysterious discovery of the bones. In addition to Fuzzy's buried treasure, people are trying to reinvent this sleepy midwestern town. There are a couple of slick real estate developers going around town talking a big game about making Kankakee into Hometown, U.S.A. Then Jane's best friend, Tim, gets in on the act, proposing that Kankakee host the World's Largest Garage Sale. But when a man turns up murdered on Fuzzy's field, the spotlight turns back to the mysterious doings on the Neilson farm. While Charlie uncovers what may or may not be an archaelogically significant site, Jane manages to uncover the town's buried secrets. With the help of her family, Tim, and sometime partner P.I. Bruce Oh, Jane must sort rumor and gossip from the true crimes before it's too late. With Buried Stuff, Sharon Fiffer continues to chronicle the events in the life of her charming, human, slightly obsessive main character, Jane Wheel; intriguing, suspenseful and lively, like the best of mystery writing today, reading Fiffer's latest novel is like coming across one of Jane's estate sale discoveries and finding it full of delights and surprises.