{"id":775,"date":"2012-09-28T17:37:12","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T23:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=775"},"modified":"2012-09-28T17:37:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T23:37:12","slug":"sharon-fiffer-backstage-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/sharon-fiffer-backstage-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharon Fiffer: Backstage Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sharon Fiffer has become one of the more reliable, and enjoyable, cozy writers around.\u00a0 For one thing, her actual prose is lovely, which is always a pleasure.\u00a0 For another, she has a sturdy cast of characters that flesh out her stories and give them lots of depth.\u00a0 Like my other favorite in this series,\u00a0Scary Stuff, <\/em>Backstage Stuff <\/em>finds antiques picker\/private eye (PPI) Jane Wheel back in her childhood home, Kankakee, Illinois.\u00a0 Part of the reason I enjoy Jane back in Kankakee so much instead of her native Chicago is the presence of her always fascinating mother, Nellie, co-proprietor (with Jane\u2019s dad, natch) of the E-Z Way Inn.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jane is in an in-between place.\u00a0 She and her long time husband are on the brink of divorce, and she\u2019s not only adjusting to her husband\u2019s absence but the absence of her now college age son.\u00a0 An empty nest on steroids.\u00a0 Jane seems less grieved about the end of her marriage than perplexed – she\u2019s trying to figure out what\u2019s next.\u00a0 One of the next things is the new cell phone her son has gotten her, which makes for a pretty funny opening scene where she can\u2019t figure out that the noise the phone is making is actually ringing, and her insistence to her departing son that she can indeed \u201ctech.\u201d\u00a0 Uh, text.<\/p>\n

Luckily, as soon as her son is off on a plane, Jane\u2019s pal and business associate Tim Lowry presses her into service, helping him to process a huge estate in (guess where) Kankakee, to ready it for sale.\u00a0 He also asks for her help in producing a local production of a play written by the deceased owner of the house they\u2019ll be working in,\u00a0Murder in the Eekaknak Valley.<\/em> To Jane\u2019s complete astonishment, her mother has a part in the play.\u00a0 Naturally she accompanies Tim and thus Fiffer is able to deftly include two classic mystery tropes – the backstage mystery, and the old house mystery.\u00a0 The old house seems to be inhabited by a creepy ventriloquists\u2019 doll, Mr. Bumbles.\u00a0 Mr. Bumbles seems to turn up everywhere, and whenever he does, it\u2019s the signal of something terrible.<\/p>\n

Fiffer is always able to balance a gentle humor with a clever plot.\u00a0 She\u2019s really one of the more skilled plotters of the traditional mystery at work at the moment – her clues are tricky but fair, and the resolution is always a surprise.\u00a0 Added to this is the nice background of antiques that she brings to every novel, as well as her skill in creating a rich cast of background characters.\u00a0 In this novel, the characters include both the cast of the play and the remaining family of the dead man, the Kendalls.\u00a0 As always, the real backbone of the story is Jane and her family and by extension, Tim.\u00a0 Nellie is a character who cannot be denied – hardworking, no-nonsense, unsentimental, and to Jane\u2019s surprise, a gifted actress. The interplay between Jane and her mother is one of the strongest elements of the book. This is a very enjoyable, clever and ultimately moving story.\u00a0 Happy reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sharon Fiffer has become one of the more reliable, and enjoyable, cozy writers around.\u00a0 For one thing, her actual prose is lovely, which is always a pleasure.\u00a0 For another, she has a sturdy cast of characters that flesh out her stories and give them lots of depth.\u00a0 Like my other favorite in this series,\u00a0Scary Stuff, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-americancozy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}