Read an Excerpt from Valerie Sherrard's Heartwarming ABSOLUTELY NO BODY PARTS

Cleaning out an old building shouldn't pull at the threads of a mystery, but that's exactly what happens in Absolutely No Body Parts (Cormorant/DCB Books), where one messy job quickly turns into something much harder to explain.

The Gross Busters are used to tackling the kinds of tasks everyone else avoids, whether it's overflowing garages, forgotten sheds, or decades of accumulated clutter. Nick, Khenan, and their unforgettable helper, Florrie, have seen just about everything. But when a cleanup at an abandoned schoolhouse uncovers something unexpected, an ordinary job becomes the start of a much bigger adventure.

Known for her engaging stories for young readers, Valerie Sherrard mixes humour, mystery, and just the right amount of suspense in Absolutely No Body Parts. Today, we're sharing an excerpt that introduces readers to the Gross Busters and the curious discovery that sends them off on their biggest case yet.

Check it out here! Free for all of our loyal OB readers!

An Excerpt from ABSOLUTELY NO BODY PARTS by Valerie Sherrard

For the record, none of what happened this summer was our fault. Not the panic, or the rumors, and certainly not the accusations that flew around like a bunch of bats who'd been startled awake by a bright light.

That didn't stop some folks from blaming us, the same way they might blame the weatherman for a storm.

There was a lot of overreacting too. People locking their doors and looking over their shoulders. I even heard a few folks claim they were cringing in fear over every creak or sigh they heard. I didn't see any need for that kind of alarm.

That's my point of view, of course. And everyone's entitled to their own opinion. So, I'm just going to go ahead and tell the whole story, and hope that settles things once and for all.

It started off so innocently.

In the beginning there were two of us. Nick Yarrowby, that's me, and Khenan Kimetto.

Khenan came up with the idea after he'd seen a show on TV about a company that cleans up crime scenes. He wasn't sure if it was a movie or reality show or what. It sounded like he might have been channel surfing and just caught parts of it in the process.

He told me about it while we were sitting out on my back deck, watching a chipmunk going bonkers. As rodents go it was cute enough, but watching it race pointlessly around the backyard wasn't exactly riveting.

The school year had just ended, and I'd been lamenting our ongoing state of penury, which is another way of saying we were always broke.

Sadly, none of the local businesses here in Glummingford had any interest in hiring fourteen-year-olds. We knew that because we'd already made the rounds asking. We'd even put on clean T-shirts, and still, nothing!

Don't get the idea from this that we're super ambitious. I wouldn't call us lazy, but we normally manage on allowances and earnings from odd jobs. Living in a small town doesn't cost what it would in a city where you have to pay for everything. Or so we hear. Most small-town activities are free.

However, in the coming winter we had a chance to go to a real live NHL game with my Aunt Tracy, who's the Boston Bruins' greatest living fan. The problem was, we needed to cover our share of the trip plus our tickets. That was going to cost us some big bucks.

Our folks would have helped if they'd been able to. They told us so—my dad and Khenan's mom. Except, they're both single parents without piles of cash to throw around on frivolities, as my dad put it. By that, he meant anything that doesn't involve a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, or food on the table.

So, when Khenan saw this TV show about mopping up murder scenes and whatnot, he saw it as a solution to our problem.

I wasn't sold on the idea at first. Certainly not while he was describing how the crew on the show had to clean up places where gruesome crimes had been committed.

"Exactly what kind of stuff are we talking about?" I asked him.

"Oh, very nasty," he admitted. "Splattered brains, bits of bone, and congealed pools of blood—that sort of thing."

"Yeah, I think I'm going to pass," I said.

"Hear me out," Khenan said. "We can make a rule about murders or corpses or whatever."

"What kind of rule?"

"How about: Absolutely no body parts!" he said. "But anything else, why not? There have to be lots of jobs scuzzy enough that people will pay to have someone else do the work."

I thought it over. Khenan pointed out that if something too gross came along, all we had to do was ask for way more money than anyone would be willing to pay.

"That's called pricing yourself out of a job," he said wisely. "My mom does it whenever someone with a bad attitude wants her to cater a meal for them."

Khenan's mom works as an administrative assistant at the elementary school, but that's only a part-time job. So, she supplements her income doing private catering. Her strategy to avoid bad jobs or bad customers sounded smart to me.

We talked it over for a while, looking at the pros and cons.

It was going to involve some disgusting stuff, there was no way around that. There'd be bug removal, turd cleanup (animal turds, of course, we had to draw the line somewhere), cleaning out creepy attics and basements and backyard sheds that probably hadn't been tended to in our lifetime.

I pointed out that there'd be smells. Lots of them. Stink and rot coming from oozing clumps of unidentifiable matter, muck, and decay. Khenan doesn't handle foul odors all that well. Plus, while we'd refuse anything to do with people parts, we were bound to run into things like rodents. Both living and dead.

"We'll use gloves and masks," he said with the calm confidence of someone not actually facing anything gross at the moment.

"We'd need a bunch of cleaning products too," I pointed out. "And we're broke."

"True, but you know very well our folks will loan us money for something like that."

I still wasn't persuaded, but Khenan had an answer for every objection I raised. Eventually, I agreed to give it a try.

So, having decided we could manage the unpleasantness, we pep-talked each other into thinking we were ready to take on almost anything.

What we were not prepared for was a job that looked perfectly innocent and yet held a secret so shocking it would scandalize the entire town.

If we'd known—well, we didn't know. And by the time we found out what we'd let ourselves in for, it was much, much too late.

Let me tell you how it all happened.

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Valerie Sherrard is the author of more than 30 books for children and teens, including the multi-award-nominated Birdspell and the novel-in-verse Standing on Neptune. Her work has won or been shortlisted for the TD, GG, Geoffrey Bilson, Ann Connor Brimer, and CLA Awards, and numerous readers’ choice programs including the Forest of Reading, MYRCA, Red Cedar, RMBA, Willows, and Hackmatack Awards. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, she now lives in Miramichi, New Brunswick.