I have to say Brianna Labuskes is on a roll if we’re talking book releases and there’ll be another release this year. It’s a first book in a new series and I already love it. This book will be released in August and is called Clean Slate.

All thriller and crime related books by Brianna, I loved to read and this one is also a banger and very different then what we’re used to with the main character being a crime scene cleaner.

Olive hunt, small business owner of a company called Clean Slate, her services? Crime scene cleaning. Something that people frown upon because of her past, her nanna and best friend even tried to talk her out of it. Her mother has been locked up in an institution of the criminally insane because she killed Olive’s father when she (Olive) was seventeen. Her mother was diagnosed with contamination OCD something that made Olive’s live a living hell. Nobody saw what went on behind closed doors and how her mother was actually going to such extremes that it could’ve been labeled as abusive, not even her grandmother knew the extend of it all.

It wasn’t lost on her that most thought her choice to become a crime scene cleaner was due to the abuse and upbringing of her mother, her mother taught her ever since she was little how to decontaminate so, that was something she was actually good at. When the first call of this book came in it was at a pay by the hour motel, shady dealings gone wrong maybe? Cleanliness wasn’t a priority in this place, so when entering the motel room and smelling cleaning supplies and the room being way to clean, Olive knew something was off. The death was labelled a suicide and it happened in the bathtub. After cleaning up, she has a thing she does where she goes in some sort of hyper focus and touches every surface, feeling for irregularities. She found something hiding in the faucet, a baggy with a newspaper article about drug ODs and the PTCC community center.

After cleaning a second scene in a posh hotel and doing the last step before locking the door behind her, she finds yet another baggy; this one with the lawyer’s calling card. Delivering this one to the police precinct and spiking her interest in understanding what’s going on… When Olive gets home and a bouquet of red roses is waiting for her, she gets goosebumps. There is a Thank You note attached. Even though the detective telling Olive to back off, she doesn’t. She keeps investigating and trying to figure out what the end game is.

When Olive finds a thread and a person that has a connection to all the people that have been offed. Olive seems to always be a step ahead of the police, going to them once she has new information for them to process and follow up on. Olive has always hated rival because he always had a PI hat on and Olive didn’t want that. She only wants to clean and then close the door behind her, but this case? It’s like the killer wants her to notice him because he or she has been looking into Olive’s way of working and how after cleaning she always does a one over even in the most not obvious places.

When the case unfolds and Olive is again a step ahead of the police, with that last puzzle piece about to click in place she actually brings herself in danger. Not calling it in beforehand so no one knows where she went. The Perp? Someone you wouldn’t expect by a long shot. Which makes this book a very good murder mystery and the gory details in crime scene cleaning gives it a whole new twist.

I’m giving this book a solid ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ star rating.