This is the gritty, edgy tale of Webster Fillmore Goodhue, a former teacher cum slacker, now employed by Clean Team, a company that does clean-up at crime scenes after the forensic teams are done. Hired by families too bereaved to deal with such a mess and without the knowledge of how to handle it even if they wanted to, Web finds a certain satisfaction in scraping bloody bits of brains, offal and gore and restoring a room such that you could not tell that a brutal murder or suicide or other messy death occurred there.

Web himself is pretty messed up inside, having lived an interesting childhood, shall we say, and then suffering a major traumatic incident as a teacher that left him essentially unable to cope with most of life except by sleeping and by being a total jerk while hes awake. Despite all that, I liked him almost immediately, much as I have liked every one of Hustons main characters in previous books. I know Im not supposed to like them, but I cant help it. Perhaps its just the authors voice or writing style, but like his other works, I found this book hard to put down and devoured it in a matter of hours.

Not for the faint of heart, nor the prim and proper, this book is graphic, full of gory descriptions of crime scenes, evidence of mans brutality towards one another and it oozes darknessand yet, it left me with a sense of hope, too. I believe this book is meant to be a stand-alone, but I hope Im wrong, because I would love to see it become a series. Theres already a great main character and a set of interesting, well-fleshed out supporting characters too. Excellent and highly recommended for lovers of indecently pulpy noir. A+

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