Liz Danger is a ghost writer who"s been traveling around the midwest writing autobiographies for various and sundry semi-famous wingnuts and making a decent living at it. But in March of her thirty-third year, she does something out of character: she detours south from her nice straight drive from Philadelphia to Chicago to meet her current client - Anemone Patterson, a seventy-something, semi-famous beauty queen - and goes back to her home town of Birney, OH, to drop off a giant purple bear at her mother"s house. In the fifteen years since she"s left Birney, she"s communicated with her mother mainly by sending her bears for every holiday and flying her mother to wherever she is every Christmas, but this time she goes home. Once there, she"s picked up for speeding by the new cop in town (Vince), delayed for a week by the breakdown of her car, drafted into the wedding of a woman she barely knows and doesn"t like (Lavender Blue), seduced without protest into the new cop"s bed, and arrested for murder (of the bride). Other than that, it"s a pretty good week.