SECONDHAND STIFF

Family ties prove both challenging and rewarding for paralegal and amateur investigator Odelia Grey (Hide & Snoop, 2012, etc.).

Hoping to amuse both her mother, Grace, who’s in town for an extended Thanksgiving visit, and her mother-in-law, Renee, Odelia drives the two of them to Elite Storage out in Long Beach, where her husband’s second cousin Ina Bruce is planning to bid on an abandoned storage locker. Ina and her husband, Tom, own a resale shop in Culver City, so locker auctions are familiar ground for her. This one, however, has a twist: When auctioneer Redmond Stokes snips the lock off to show its contents, the locker’s most prominent item is Tom’s corpse. Now, Ina’s in jail, refusing to talk. So it’s up to Odelia and her husband, Greg, to figure out the connection between Tom’s murder, his mistress, Linda McIntyre, a blogger named Bob Y who uses the Internet to trash talk Los Angeles thrift shops, a food truck called Comfort Foodies and a drive-by shooting on the 405 freeway. For better or worse, they now have a partner, for Grace insists on shouldering her share of the detecting, perhaps to make up for walking out when Odelia was still a teen. Will Grace prove a boon or bane to Odelia, who’s still adjusting to her mom’s abrupt re-entry into her life?

Ina’s goods may be secondhand, but Jaffarian’s are first-class.