Throwaway Angels

Claire Wilkshire is a PhD candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

Tova manages a laudromat. Stuck in a rut, she has chosen to wash clothes
as an orderly, risk-free means of restoring some kind of decency—or at
least cleanliness—to her environment. Not far into this reasonably
well written whodunit, Tova is dragged out of her predictable lifestyle
into a mystery involving a man’s death and a woman’s disappearance.
The threads are not all wrapped up at the end, leaving the reader
intrigued rather than sated.

The protagonist is a lesbian. Lesbian sleuths are becoming more common
these days, but they don’t exactly grow on trees. Furthermore, she is
a Canadian lesbian, and it is a pleasure to read about sleuthing that
takes place in Vancouver rather than the United States.

The story is not simply plot. Throwaway Angels is as much about the
choices we make, the kinds of lives we lead, and the extent of our
compassion toward other people as it is about the corpse in the
dumpster. It’s a good read, a solid first novel.