For years, Ziggy Breener, Burnt Cove’s eccentric Can Man, has lived a simple life, riding his bicycle along the town roads to collect returnables.

Life gets a lot more complicated when Ziggy inherits a piece of prime waterfront land from the equally eccentric Myra Huggard.

Moving to a new neighborhood brings new friends as well as new enemies. Sadly, his friends turn out to be more dangerous than his enemies, especially when he’s presented with an elephant who moves into his backyard.

Things go from bad to worse when his new guest apparently kills somebody, and the elephantine suspect turns out to have a checkered past. Desperate, Ziggy persuades his friends, amateur sleuths Sarah Cassidy and Oliver Wendell to help prove the elephant’s innocence.

But if the pesky pachyderm isn’t the killer, then who is? Did the murder have something to do with a long-forgotten legend about buried treasure hidden on Myra Huggards’ land? Were Ziggy’s angry neighbors behind the death? Was there some darker motive?

These questions and more lead Sarah back to her tangled childhood relationship with the Huggards. Once again she finds herself having to confront painful memories from her past in order to solve an old mystery and find a modern-day killer.