Clean Slate
by Brianna Labuskes
4 out of 5 stars
Thank you to Over the River PR for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions, as always, are my own.
I went into Clean Slate expecting a solid thriller and came out having read most of it in a single afternoon, which is always the best sign a book is working exactly as intended.
This is the launch of Brianna Labuskes's new Olive Hunt series, and it centers on Olive, a crime scene cleaner who has spent nearly a decade scrubbing away the aftermath of other people's worst days as a way of managing her own childhood trauma. It's a genuinely great premise for a thriller. Olive isn't a cop or a journalist stumbling into a case, she's someone whose entire professional life trains her to read a room the way most people read a face, and that expertise is what tips her off when two supposed suicides and then a third death start looking like something else entirely: murders staged with real precision. When an arrangement of roses and an anonymous thank-you show up on her doorstep, the case stops being abstract and starts being about her.
What Labuskes does well here, drawing on the same instincts that have made her Dr. Gretchen White and Raisa Susanto series work, is trust her premise instead of overselling it. Olive's job gives the book a specificity that a lot of serial-killer thrillers don't bother with, the procedural detail of what a staged scene actually looks like versus a real one is where the tension lives, and it's more effective than another round of detective interrogation scenes would have been. Olive herself is prickly in a believable way rather than a quirky-damaged way; her numbness reads as hard-fought rather than as a shorthand for "traumatized woman," and the book is patient about peeling that back.
The pacing holds up well across the middle section, which is often where series openers start to sag under the weight of setup. Labuskes keeps escalating the personal stakes (that anonymous admirer thread is genuinely unsettling) rather than just adding bodies. Where I felt the seams a little was in some of the secondary characters, particularly on the investigative side, who don't get quite the same texture as Olive and occasionally exist mostly to move information along. It's a common first-in-series growing pain, absolutely not a dealbreaker.
If you like your thrillers with an unusual professional hook and a heroine who's allowed to be genuinely strange rather than palatably quirky, this is a strong new series opener from an author with a real track record in the genre, and I'm already looking forward to where she takes Olive next.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)
Tropes/Themes: Serial killer thriller, crime scene cleaner, unconventional heroine, staged murders, childhood trauma
Tea Pairing: Blood orange black tea. Sharp, a little unsettling, and just red enough
Song Pairing: "Bad Guy" by Billie Eilish. Quiet menace hiding in plain sight
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