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Scary Stuff (2009)

by Sharon Fiffer(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0312387784 (ISBN13: 9780312387785)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Minotaur Books

series

Jane Wheel

review 1: Wheel is an "antique picker." She finds old stuff for people who want them and will pay lots of money to have them. She does this part-time, the other part being an associate to an ex-cop-turned-private detective, Bruce Oh.While visiting her brother Michael, for the first time in years, she finds out from him that people have him confused with someone who looks exactly like him - well, almost. And that people think he conned them with selling fake stuff. And are willing to do him some harm because of it. And that the real con man, whoever he is, lives very close to Jane herself. So, she has decided that when she goes back home, she will locate the duplicate and tell him to stop selling junk.Only it doesn't work out that way. While trying to find out who the con man,... more Honest Joe, really is, she finds out a lot of other things. Things about her family that she never knew. Relatives her mother, Nellie, never told her about. And someone is willing to kill to make sure that she never finds out the truth.While Jane and her friend Tim prepare a friend's home for a sale, they notice things just Aren't What They Are Supposed to Be. And things only go downhill from there.This book started out okay, but I just really couldn't get all that interested in it. Jane is supposed to be an "antique picker," as I stated, but I think the better term would be "hoarder." They do television shows about people like her. People who keep safety pins because "they're pretty." People who collect old dog dishes. People who have floor-to-ceiling boxes of junk. Which are junk, since she doesn't do anything with them except collect them. Don't get me wrong; everyone collects something. I collect things. But only one or two things. Not dozens of things. And you can walk through my house without thinking you'll be buried alive. From the description of Jane's personal space, a good earthquake and you'll never find the body. I could be wrong, but my own opinion. I also thought her relationship with her husband was odd and couldn't figure out why they were married. Well, by the end of the book, that was resolved the way I figured it probably would (unless in a later book, something miraculously changes).I guess I just thought Jane Wheel is a strange duck: a hoarder in a long-distance relationship that she could just go about doing whatever it was she did without having to worry about another human being. You want to like the main character, or at least have sympathy for them, but I did neither. She didn't really think ahead, just plunged into situations.The mystery itself could have been better, since the situations seemed a little off-the-wall. When the killer was finally revealed, you would have thought that before acting, they would have done a little more homework to make sure that what they were planning would have worked out - like find out if there were any other living relatives. It just didn't make any sense. If you've read the book, you'll know what I'm talking about.
review 2: The main character, Jane, annoys me tremendously. She collects things, she is a Picker, and she is a PI (kind of). She is surrounded by clutter, rooms full of clutter, a garage full of clutter, all of which she calls collectibles. I call it crap. She has a husband whom she pretty much ignores and who ignores her. She has a son who seems to be a small blip in her daily life. She has a best friend who also collects clutter, only his clutter is more upscale. Her parents own a bar in the country. Her brother lives in California and is their mom's favorite child, according to Jane who can't seem to get over the fact that her mom didn't save every piece of crap that Jane had as a kid. Jane spends a lot of time whining to herself about her life as a child. She spends a lot of time getting side-tracked by various things and events. I don't particularly care for her, which is the main reason that I didn't really like the book. less

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