STICKY FINGERS

An architectural salvager discovers that the real trash can be found among Pittsburgh’s intellectual elite.

When times are tough in the salvage business, Roxy Abruzzo (Our Lady of Immaculate Deception, 2010, etc.) isn’t above taking on odd jobs for her mobbed-up uncle Carmine. But there are some jobs that are just too odd for Roxy, and kidnapping her old schoolmate Clarice Crabtree is one of them. Not that Clarice wasn’t a pain even in high school, where she rubbed Roxy’s nose in her working-class roots. But now that she’s a museum curator who specializes in megafauna, Clarice is an insufferable snob who brushes off Roxy’s attempts to warn her about the kidnap threat. When a rug containing Clarice’s corpse turns up in an abandoned field, Roxy sheds no tears. But her old friend Bug Duffy, now a police detective, thinks Roxy knows more than she’s telling. Besides, Roxy has promised herself to be a better role model for her teenaged daughter Sage. So she bundles her cousin Nooch and her mutt Rooney into her truck to check out Clarice’s digs, where she finds two grieving widowers: the sire to Richie, Clarice’s budding fashion-designer son, and the adopted father of her China-born daughter, Olympic skating hopeful Sugar. Now Clarice has to evade Bug’s sharp questions—as well as some softer advances from Sage’s father Flynn, her old flame—while figuring out who had it in for a multiply-married lady.