At a dinner party hosted by millionaire Fairfield Dixon in his luxurious, art-filled mansion, the talk is surprisingly freewheeling and boisterous. Selwyn McCandless, the manager of a large brokerage firm, and his wife, Virginia, are among the guests. As the conversation rattles on, growing ever more risque and bawdy, Selwyn becomes increasingly mortified; he resolves to say something that will return civility and decorum to the proceedings. At the conclusion of his peroration, a shot rings out. Someone has been fatally wounded. Is there any cause-and-effect between Selwyn's comments and the fatal shot? For the rest of his life, he will fear that there is. During the days that follow the fateful night, he receives a letter saying that the clues to receiving large portions of Fairfield Dixon's wealth will be found in the city's thrift shops. The letter, he realizes has been carbon-copied to all the people who were at dinner, that night. But Selwyn McCandless is a busy man: a dapper dresser, a conservative company- type, a not-too-imaginative person who, day after day, guides the investments of others. What will it take for him to leave his protected, corporate world, and become someone who prowls among -- lowers himself to -- cast-offs in dingy thrift shops? Selwyn's son, meanwhile, a veritable connoisseur of thrift shops, has been working on the crew that is building a new museum for Fairfield Dixon's art. Unlike his father, Marvin McCandless gets his hands dirty. And that fact eventually leads him to become a suspect in the murder, and to be subjected to repeated questioning. This is a whodunit, and to give away more of the plot would ruin it. But THRIFT SHOP MURDERS is much more than a whodunit. In its many threads, it is a reflection on materiality -- Americans' love of money and stuff -- versus spirituality; on effete and anonymous corporate power versus hard, dirty manual labor; on being controlled by abstract finance versus controlling one's own surroundings through craft; in the end, on what makes value . . . valuable. If a thing had one value when it was new, what is its value now that it has been relegated to a thrift shop? What is the worth . . . of worth? Yes, in the end, the original murder -- as well as the ones that follow -- are solved, and all the threads neatly woven together."