The Cleaner

THE CLEANER gets off to an eerie start and gets stranger and more intense by the minute. Jonathan Quinn is a covert operator in a shadowy underworld of spying and global organized crime. With his clumsy trainee in tow and only a few necessary facts from "The Office," Quinn sets out to determine what went wrong in a house fire in Colorado and ends up in the middle of an all-out war on him and his Office colleagues. The text lends itself well to audio, and Scott Brick ably performs the narrator's duties. The story rarely gets bogged down, and Brick moves from subdued scene-setting to fast-paced action with aplomb, bringing the reader along every step of the way. A fun thriller. J.B.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

May 28, 2007
Displaying an enviable gift for pacing and action, Battles’s debut novel is a page-turner that may remind some readers of the cult TV spy series Alias
. Ex-cop Jonathan Quinn now works for a shadowy U.S. intelligence agency known merely as the Office, erasing all traces of violence and mayhem when an operation goes south. During an apparently routine assignment to look into a fatal fire that claimed the life of Robert Taggart, a viral biologist, in his Colorado home, Quinn finds evidence that Taggart was murdered, and that discovery is followed by an attempt on Quinn’s own life. While Quinn survives, he learns that the Office’s top operatives have been killed in near-simultaneous attacks. Quinn, who makes a compelling protagonist, heads to Europe to track down the mastermind behind the scheme. Admirers of quality espionage fiction can look forward to a new series worth following.