A lot of people will probably enjoy this mystery with queer protagonists, but I found it too dense with self-conscious jokes. Isabel is an out-of-work social worker, who has been tasked by an elderly friend to unravel the mystery of the friend's granddaughter Maddy's death. Maddy was a sex worker and drug addict, so her death doesn't appear to be that big a mystery, until Isabel finds some strange items in the apartment Maddy had shared with another girl, who goes missing herself. Then Isabel's apartment gets trashed, and she's attacked outside a club.

If there were fewer jokey asides and footnotes, I might have made it through. Note to the publisher regarding one of the footnotes: "Oprah, Uma" was David Letterman, not Billy Crystal.