The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

Author Charlie Huston's books are never for the prudish or the squeamish, and the nature of audiobooks makes it tricky to skim past the frequent cursing, detailed acts of violence, and gobbets of gore--and frankly, if you did, there wouldn't be much dialogue or story left. But if you sit back and enjoy the ride, you'll discover a surprisingly gentle tale of redemption. Reader Paul Michael Garcia manages an astonishing array of vocal pitches--from bass male to alto female. More important, he inhabits this novel's smart-mouthed, emotionally scarred narrator, Web, a former elementary school teacher who takes a job scrubbing up after messy deaths and, consequently, becomes entangled with various shady entrepreneurs with very short tempers. A.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

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.