Dirty Laundry by Daniel Ehrenhaft

First Line: Good Morning.

Dirty Laundry starts, appropriately, with a missing person who was last seen on her way to the laundromat. That missing person is Darcy, the least screwed up pupil in a cast of supremely screwy people at Winchester, a laundromat in its own right as the shabby boarding school where all the hopeless, washed up kids go to clean up their act.

But, while Darcy’s disappearance may get the story started, she’s more an ideal than a real character — the one good kid that really got something they didn’t deserve and the mystery to be solved. Ehrenhaft’s large list of players are all suspects and all have something to hide. There’s Nails, Darcy’s recently dumped boyfriend with a incongruous accent; Miranda, the new senior who gets too cozy too fast with another student; Carli, an actress going undercover as Sheila to research a role; and Fun, the son of a Hollywood producer who is forced into secretly helping Carli or face expulsion. Plus, about another dozen people. Seriously, for a novel as thin as Dirty Laundry, the number of people to keep track of is large.

Ehrenhaft tells the story between the alternating viewpoints of Carli and Fun in short, snappy sentences and a quirky sensibility. It took a bit for me to get into the book because of the format and the huge cast that is introduced almost immediately, but it’s an enjoyable book overall. Of the two protagonists, Fun is definitely more … fun. Carli’s perspective is mostly in psycho-babble martyr speak, with a lot of worrying about shame spirals and hand-wringing about not putting in her time at the local soup kitchen. It got annoying and, needless to say, felt forced and fake. But, Dirty Laundry was largely enjoyable as a quick mystery that leaves a heavy trail of red herrings set against a contained backdrop of a crumbling, second-rate boarding school.   

For: A whodunit that doesn’t skimp on character development. – Jennifer Peterson

Buy it at Amazon.