Robin MacFarland is a fifty-five-year-old widow who grapples entertainingly with aging, drinking, weight, loneliness, and career failure, all the while solving two murders. She is also a somewhat eccentric and highly intelligent journalist for the Home and Garden section of a Toronto paper. Although the novel is framed around an environmental plot about the theft of Canada's fresh water, it hinges upon a current social issue and Robin's journey through the middle portion of her life. Flush has an environmental subject ostensibly underpinning its plot, a social issue motivating the crime, and, ironically and symbolically, an endangered species as a murder weapon.