ANTIQUES ROADKILL

You really can’t go home again—not when mom’s cleaned the place out.

Divorcée Brandy Borne returns to her family home, carrying the remains of her brand-name wardrobe and Sushi, her blind shih tzu, to find that her mother, in a moment of weakness, has sold all her family’s antiques to an unscrupulous dealer. Brandy’s relieved that her mother is back on her medication, but the furniture is still gone, and she’s determined to get it back and keep other senior citizens of the quaint town of Serenity from being similarly victimized. Having inherited her mother’s dramatic tendencies, she denounces the antiques dealer, Clint Carson, in public, then faces his threat of a restraining order. Meantime, Brandy dodges her old acquaintance, Jennifer Kaufmann, whose husband Brandy fooled around with at their recent high-school reunion—the proximate cause for her divorce and Jennifer’s ladylike hostility. Carson is found killed and run over, in that order, on the very night Brandy’s mother, sans driver’s license, roams in the family car, with Brandy in pursuit. Covering for each other, mother and daughter mount an investigation, uncovering some serious and not-so-serious crimes.

So breezy it feels windswept, this collaboration between Max Allan Collins and wife Barbara (Murder—His and Hers, 2001, etc.), a shopping bag of ill-assorted bonbons, features cutesy parenthetical comments, nonstop product placement and absolutely nothing of substance.