Clean Slate (Olive Hunt Book 1) by Brianna Labuskes (ARC)

This is the first of a new series and I am already fascinated. This time our narrator is a crime scene cleaner (aka bodily fluids cleaner). She has a strong support system, her own business, contacts both lawful and shady, and everything is going as usual until she finds something weird at the crime scene. Something maybe only she could find. Something maybe she was meant to find.

This book is about betrayals, large and small, and about vengeance mistaken for justice. It's also about traumas and their effects, starting with Olive's and including each person the murders touched.

Advanced reader copy provided by NetGalley.

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Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskes
4.5/5 stars.

This book is about identity, the kind you're forced into, the kind you form for yourself, and all the internal and external conflicts that come with those identities. It's about relationships and which ones are "real," and how that comes to be. It's also about how far our responsibility toward others extends.

Labuskes brought a deep understanding of parasocial relationships and unintended consequences to this book. The skewering of the trad wife influencer sphere was brutal but also sympathetic, and her few stabs at publishers abandoning journalism were also on point. And of course there was a twist or twelve.

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At this point I think I've read every suspense novel Brianna Labuskes has written to date, including the as yet unpublished series finale I reviewed last year. I read her most recent series first and it's been fascinating to go back and then watch her develop and refine the stories she tells so well.

Her books all feature multiple points of view from different characters at different times, which not only fills in the story but also obscures details, depending upon who's doing the telling. As with much suspense, her stories are sad, and often the endings aren't happy, merely triumphant. Her stories are puzzles, both for the people solving them and the readers, and her protagonists are often the sort to acknowledge that.

If you like puzzles and unreliable & introspective narrators you might enjoy her books.

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