The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

Starred review from November 10, 2008
Noir master Huston (The Shotgun Rule
) should win himself a whole new audience with this bizarre and utterly grotesque stand-alone, told mostly through dialogue that highlights the author’s uncanny ear for the spoken word. Former Los Angeles grade school teacher Web Goodhue, now a full-time slacker suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, falls into a job on a crime scene cleanup crew, scrubbing up the remains of the recently deceased. After the crew has finished cleaning up a messy suicide scene in Malibu, Web gets a phone call from the dead man’s daughter, Soledad. She and her thug half-brother have another big mess on their hands that needs cleaning, on the QT. Unable to resist the beautiful Soledad, Web soon finds himself in way over his head. Huston, one of his generation’s finest and hippest talents, shows in grisly detail what cleaning up after the dead entails. This one should appeal to Chuck Palahniuk fans as well as hard-boiled crime readers.

November 1, 2008
A troubled young man tries to redeem his life.

Web Goodhue is running out of fans. His best friend Chev, who 's fed and housed him uncomplainingly, finally gives him an ultimatum: Shape up or get lost. Perhaps it 's the shock of an endangered friendship that catapults Web toward epiphany. He begins to understand that trauma, however real and painful, can 't forever excuse parasitic behavior. So he gets a job, and an unlikely job it is. Webster Goodhue, former dedicated high-school teacher, is now a crime-scene cleaner-upper. As the newest member of Team Clean, his role is to scrub away the messy and invariably gore-drenched aftermath of violent death. Oddly enough, he finds the work satisfying —an encouraging sign that he 's on his way to becoming "a kind of a grown-up. " True, he encounters unimagined downsides, from severe beatings administered by rancorous rivals (crime-scene cleaning, it turns out, is a growth industry that 's fiercely competitive) to a near-death experience at the hands of some no-goods convinced he stands between them and a cherished get-rich scam. As for the upsides, there 's the lovely, sexy Soledad, who may have an unexpected downside as well.

Violent and uncomfortably graphic at times, but the dialogue is sharp and funny, and Huston (The Shotgun Rule, 2007, etc.), as always, does it his way.

(COPYRIGHT (2008) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 15, 2008
This isn't a typical mysteryreaders don't encounter a murder until p. 192and the protagonist isn't a typical investigator, but then Huston's previous works featuring a vampire PI (Joe Pitt Casebooks series) and a slacker hit man (Hank Thompson) are also atypical. In Huston's second stand-alone work (after "Shotgun Rule"), Web Goodhue, a thirtyish Hollywood elementary school teacher traumatized by the violent death of a student, quits his job and retreats into an emotional shell. Helping an acquaintance clean up crime scenes gets Web involved with a young woman whose father died in a very messy suicide. She and her maniacal brother entangle Web in stolen almonds, human smuggling, murderous criminals, and her own kidnapping. Huston tells a wild and fanciful tale with gritty and witty skill, although the graphic language may be too strong for some patrons. For most public libraries.Roland Person, emeritus, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2008
Romanticizing the knockaround lives of aimless young Southern Californians as he did in his last stand-alone novel, The Shotgun Rule (2007) and, to a certain extent, in the delightful Hank Thompson trilogy that launched his career, Huston here focuses on Webster Fillmore Goodhue, the twentysomething son of a gonzo novelist gone to seed and a hippie mother gone to weed. Paralyzed by a traumatic incident that led him to give up his teaching gig and launch a second career as a world-class jerk, Web seems to have finally found his calling when he signs on with a crime-scene cleaning service. But when a beautiful customer begs him to sanitize a bloody hotel room before the cops show up, Web jumps back on the path to self-destruction. Readers likely will be charmed enough by the literate, funny, and sensitive Web to care about whether he cleans up his act. And while the criminals he tangles withas well as the misfit cleaning crew he runs withmay be incidental to the plot, they give Huston plenty of opportunities to create his signature witty mayhem.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)

March 30, 2009
Huston's darkly comic slice of Southern California noir is filled with distinctive characters that leap from the page and, thanks to Paul Michael Garcia's remarkable versatility, speak in equally arresting voices. Chief among them is Web Goodhue, the novel's narrator, a slacker forced by circumstance into temp work with a crew that mops up messy postmortem residue. Just as Huston makes the outwardly obnoxious and brutally snarky protagonist sympathetic, Garcia layers self-doubt, sensitivity and intelligence beneath the arrogance and an overriding humanity that Web attempts to mask with his misanthropic (often very funny) remarks. The other characters are equally well matched vocally: Web's father speaks with the boozy rasp of a self-loathing alcoholic; Po Sin, the massive boss of the Clean Team, has a deep and rumbling delivery; and femme fatale Solidad tries to hide her naïveté behind hard-boiled banter. Throw in a gallery of motor mouth crazies, flat-voiced killers and Web's amazingly tolerant best friend Chev, and you have a thrilling and smartly enacted audio package. A Ballantine hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 10).

November 1, 2008
A troubled young man tries to redeem his life.

Web Goodhue is running out of fans. His best friend Chev, who's fed and housed him uncomplainingly, finally gives him an ultimatum: Shape up or get lost. Perhaps it's the shock of an endangered friendship that catapults Web toward epiphany. He begins to understand that trauma, however real and painful, can't forever excuse parasitic behavior. So he gets a job, and an unlikely job it is. Webster Goodhue, former dedicated high-school teacher, is now a crime-scene cleaner-upper. As the newest member of Team Clean, his role is to scrub away the messy and invariably gore-drenched aftermath of violent death. Oddly enough, he finds the work satisfying —an encouraging sign that he's on his way to becoming "a kind of a grown-up. " True, he encounters unimagined downsides, from severe beatings administered by rancorous rivals (crime-scene cleaning, it turns out, is a growth industry that's fiercely competitive) to a near-death experience at the hands of some no-goods convinced he stands between them and a cherished get-rich scam. As for the upsides, there's the lovely, sexy Soledad, who may have an unexpected downside as well.

Violent and uncomfortably graphic at times, but the dialogue is sharp and funny, and Huston (The Shotgun Rule, 2007, etc.), as always, does it his way.

(COPYRIGHT (2008) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)