#Review - Clean Slate by Brianna Labuskes #Mystery #Suspense

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.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble 

#Review - The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes #Historical #Holocaust #WorldWarII

Series: Standalone
Format: Paperback, 384 pages
Release Date: March 19, 2024
Publisher: William Morrow
Source: Publisher
Genre: Historical / Holocaust / World War II

From the author of The Librarian of Burned Books, comes a novel about a librarian's quest to return a precious book stolen by the Nazis to its rightful owner and the story of how that book united two very different sisters in their fight to survive World War II.

Germany, 1946: Emmy Clarke is a librarian not a soldier. But that doesn’t stop the Library of Congress from sending her overseas to Germany to help the Monuments Men retrieve and catalog precious literature that was plundered by the Nazis. The Offenbach Archival Depot and its work may get less attention than returning art to its rightful owners, but for Emmy, who sees the personalized messages on the inside of the books and the notes in margins of pages, it feels just as important.

On Emmy’s first day at work, she finds a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke, and on the title page is a handwritten dedication: “To Annelise, my brave Edelweiss Pirate.” Emmy is instantly intrigued by the story behind the dedication and becomes determined to figure out what happened.

The hunt for the rightful owner of the book leads Emmy to two sisters, a horrific betrayal, and an extraordinary protest against the Nazis that was held in Berlin at the height of the war. Hundreds of brave women gathered in the streets after their Jewish husbands were detained by the Gestapo. Through freezing rain and RAF bombings, the women faced down certain death and did what so few others dared to do under the Third Reich. They said no.

Emmy grapples with her own ghosts as she begins to wonder if she’s just chasing two more. What she finds instead is a powerful story of love, forgiveness, and courage that brings light to even the darkest of postwar days.

Brianna Labuskes' The Lost Book of Bonn is a Historical fiction novel inspired by real events. This book focuses on three different women: American Emmy Clarke, German sisters Annelise Fisher, and Christiana Fisher. This turns out to be one woman's quest to return a precious book stolen by the Nazis to its rightful owner and the story of how that book united two very different sisters in their fight to survive World War II. But could it also be Emmy's path to finding a new beginning after a painful loss? 

Germany, 1946: Emmy Clarke is a librarian, not a soldier who lost her husband at Normandy. She works as an archivist at the Library of Congress recruited as a temporary volunteer archivist to head to Offenbach am Main, where the government had set up an archival depot that held the millions of books the Nazis had plundered from occupied nations. It was part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit, better known as the Monuments Men which is a real group. Her co-worker/boss is Major Wesley Arnold who was one of the Monuments Men until he was injured. 

The Offenbach am Main Archival Depot holds millions of books that the Nazis plundered. Its work may get less attention than returning art to its rightful owners, but for Emmy, who sees the personalized messages on the inside of the books and the notes in the margins of pages, it feels just as important. On Emmy’s first day at work, she finds a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke, and on the title page is a handwritten dedication: “To Annelise, my brave Edelweiss Pirate.” Emmy is instantly intrigued by the story behind the dedication and becomes determined to figure out what happened. 

The hunt for the rightful owner of the book leads Emmy to two sisters (Annelise & Christina Fischer), a horrific betrayal, and an extraordinary protest against the Nazis that was held in Berlin at the height of the war by a group called Women of Rose Street. Hundreds of brave women (including Christina) gathered in the streets after their Jewish husbands were detained by the Gestapo. Through freezing rain and RAF bombings, the women faced down certain death and did what so few others dared to do under the Third Reich. They said no. 

With Wesley's help, Emmy grapples with her own ghosts as she begins to wonder if she’s just chasing two more. What she finds instead is a powerful story of love, forgiveness, and courage that brings light to even the darkest of postwar days. There are two other storylines going on: Annelise in 1937-38 and Christina in 1943 with the Abwehr or German resistance. In 1937, Annelise is a 16-year-old living in Bonn, Germany. She is what's called an Edelweiss Pirate, a group that refuses to conform to Hitler's ideology. 

She dresses outlandishly and spends much of her time in the nearby mountains with other youths who share her views. She and her friends have become involved in prank-like behavior toward the Reich hoping to wake up the general population to the atrocities being committed by their own government. The question becomes what will they do as the tactics of government harden. Things become much more dangerous when she falls for Eitan Basch, a Jewish boy who is afraid he'll be deported, or worse.

Christina, who is my second favorite character, is the perfect Hitler Youth or Hitlerjugend. She likes order and deals well with rules. She joined the Bund Deutscher Madel, the group intended for all girls. She even goes as far as to follow Annelise and Eitan around and nearly gets them both killed. But 6 years later (1943) we discover that Christina has been living a double life. She's actually working with the Americans to help spy on Hitler's people hoping to end the War and to make up for the hurt she caused her own sister. 

One of the best scenes of the book was when Aryan women stood up to the Nazis under Goebbels and demanded that their Jewish husbands be released. As mentioned above, this actually happened. This made such noise in Germany, that even Hitler ended up backing down. It's too bad these same Germans didn't stand up sooner to Hitler and his Third Reich, instead of allowing him to put fear into their hearts when it came to the Jewish people, gypsies, and anyone else who was not considered Aryan including gay people. 

My favorite character was Annelise. She and her friends actually tried hard to change people's minds. While the Hitler Youth worked to promote the Nazi party's agenda, the Edelweiss Pirates opposed Nazism and engaged in activities to undermine the Nazi control. An increasing number of teens and their parents became outraged by the use of the Hitler Youth organization to train children for combat and brainwash them into the Nazi ideology. Members spray-painted anti-Hitler messages on walls and buildings, threw bricks through munition factory windows, and even dumped sugar into the gas tanks of Nazi cars. Most of the group were between 14-18.

Amazon | Audible | Barnes & Noble | Kobo