Series: Olive Hunt # 1
Format: 312 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: August 4, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Mystery, Suspense
A crime scene cleaner is on the trail of a serial killer in a breathtaking novel of psychological suspense by USA Today bestselling author Brianna Labuskes.
Death pays well for Olive Hunt, a crime scene cleaner who channels her childhood traumas into erasing the suffering of others. After nearly ten years, she’s seen it all. Nothing rattles her anymore.
Until now.
Two back-to-back suicides. A seedy motel. An upscale Atlanta hotel. No connection—except that Olive discovers the same strange item at each scene. Then a third body drops. Olive knows what the police refuse to see: These aren’t suicides. They’re murders staged to perfection.
Then the roses arrive. A vase of blood-red blooms on her doorstep. An anonymous note: Thank you.
She’s found him. A serial killer who’s been leaving breadcrumbs only she can see. A killer who’s been cleaning up his work—knowing she’ll clean up after him. A killer who wants her to follow.
And follow she must. No matter how terrifying the trail becomes.
Clean Slate is a sharp, grimly original psychological thriller that launches Brianna Labuskes’s Olive Hunt series with a protagonist you don’t usually get in crime fiction: a crime-scene cleaner who notices what cops miss because her job, her trauma, and her compulsions force her to look everywhere.. This story alternates between now and then, and between various characters, including Olive Hunt. Olive Hunt owns Clean Slate, an Atlanta business that erases the physical leftovers of violence: blood, brain matter, the smell of a life that ended badly.
After nearly a decade, she is professionally unflappable. Then two deaths land on her schedule in quick succession—one in a cheap motel, one in a luxury hotel—both labeled suicides. At each scene, she finds the same odd item hidden where only someone who actually cleans would look. A third body follows. Olive is sure these are staged murders. The police are slower to agree. Then roses appear on her doorstep with a note that says Thank you. The killer has been leaving breadcrumbs specifically for her.
He knows how she works. He wants her to follow. Olive is the reason the novel works. She was raised by a mother whose contamination OCD curdled into cruelty; her father was killed when she was seventeen, and her mother ended up institutionalized. Olive inherited the rituals—multiple showers, raw hands—and redirected them into a job that, from the outside, looks like the last thing someone with her history should do. Labuskes treats the OCD as texture and constraint, not a punchline or a superpower. The same hyper-focus that makes Olive good at her work also keeps her circling trauma she has never fully named.
She is also funny in a dry, practical way, loyal to the Peach Tree Community Center that once sheltered her, and unusually decent about the dead. Around her: detectives Donovan Mitchell and Cormac “Sully” Sullivan; found-family figures Anthony Last and his daughter Leah; the wealthy Suttons; and other voices from the community center’s past. The novel uses multiple points of view—Olive in first person in the present, others (notably Anthony and Darla) in third person across “then” timelines that slowly lock onto the present. That braid is doing real work: the past is not just backstory; it is the motive engine.
Pacing after the first act is generally tight. Olive does not play lone-wolf amateur sleuth in the most irritating sense: she takes what she finds to the police, then keeps looking anyway because the killer is talking to her. That balance will still annoy readers who hate civilian investigators. It will satisfy readers who want a heroine who is curious without being cartoonishly reckless every chapter. Under the cat-and-mouse plot is a class novel. Atlanta’s Peach Tree Community Center is the emotional and thematic hub: a place where the ultra-rich and the barely-getting-by once occupied the same rooms as kids and then diverged into incompatible ideas of what a life is worth.
Crime-scene cleaning is described with enough physical specificity to be unsettling and enough respect to avoid torture-porn tourism. This is clearly Book 1, with enough unresolved life around Olive that a sequel is welcome rather than a mandatory cliffhanger. Clean Slate is a strong series opener: not flawless, but distinctive. This book stands apart from the author's previous novels because the heroine’s job and psychology are the same instrument. If you want a police procedural with a cleaner in the background, look elsewhere. If you want a damaged, decent woman following a killer who has studied how she scrubs a room, this is the one.
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