The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.

Huston, Charlie (author).

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 with—as well as the misfit cleaning crew he runs with—may be incidental to the plot, they give Huston plenty of opportunities to create his signature witty mayhem.