Was preparing myself for disappointment halfway thru this book as it all seemed a little too farfetched but definitely redeemded itself in the latter half when the pace picked up considerably with a number of twists and turns and the ultimate conspiracy / plot becoming revealed perhaps that reveal should have come sooner but I will follow the adventures of Jonathan Quinn for a while longer. ( )

Debut novel
First Mystery Club - July ( )

First book featuring Jonathan Quinn, the "Cleaner" of the title. Quinn's job is to clean up secret operations. He works in the shadows but now people are out to kill him. He teams up with his apprentice and a female ex colleague to thwart the threat. An enjoyable, straightforwardly written story. ( )

In his line of work Jonathan Quinn does a lot of travelling. He’s a cleaner, usually hired to clean up messes others have left behind, inconvenient traces that may incriminate. He thinks of himself as a "dry cleaner". He removes bodies but is rarely called upon to initiate violence himself. All that is about to change. This time he has been sent to find out first hand what caused the death of a tourist in a farmhouse fire just out of Denver, Colorado.

Quinn quickly concludes this fire was no accident, and the victim no tourist. Things just don’t jell. The farmhouse is isolated but there is no indication of how the victim got there. He realises the body in the farmhouse is meant to be seen as a warning but for whom? And why?

Just as he himself was once an apprentice in the cleaning business, so Quinn is now training a young man. Nate has a lot to learn – he is overeager, a little raw, but he is learning fast. There are times though when thinking for both himself and Nate is a real handicap.

When a fellow cleaner attempts to assassinate Quinn he realises that somehow what he has found out about the farmhouse body has put him on a hit list. Both he and Nate are in danger. Quinn’s quest to find out what is going on takes them from Los Angeles, via Vietnam, to Berlin, uncovering a threat that not only challenges the Office for whom Quinn works, but the very safety of the human race. The closer he gets to uncovering the secret, the more dangerous it becomes for himself and those he contacts.

THE CLEANER is a fast moving thriller, in a style made popular by Alistair Maclean, Jack Higgins, Hammond Innes, and more recently Matthew Reilly. Not really my favourite genre, the story at times strained the bounds of credibility. Nevertheless the plotting is tight, the tension sustained, and the central scenario believable.

This is a strong debut novel, followed up recently by a second in the series, THE DECEIVED. An American by birth, Brett Battles lives in California. ( )

In Brett Battles' books The Cleaner and The Deceived I've found a new character to add to the list of very enjoyable thriller characters currently populated with the likes of Jack Reacher, John Rain, and Gabriel Allon. Jonathan Quinn is certainly interesting and I look forward to learning more about him in further books from Battles.

As I mentioned in my review of The Deceived, Battles did a nice job of "remembering" that the prior story (as told in The Cleaner) had occurred; unfortunately, having read The Deceived first, some of the surprises of The Cleaner weren't surprising at all (such as the identity of the principal villain). Oh, well; that certainly wasn't Battles' fault, but rather, my own, for violating my own rule about reading series books out of order.

If anything, The Cleaner was a better book (though not by much) than The Deceived. The story was a bit more straightforward (without the "twist too far") but was nevertheless very enjoyable. I particularly like the attention that Battles pays to detail (such as equipment and techniques) that gives the reader the feeling that Quinn is really, really good at what he does. My only real criticism of the story is that I found the description of a key location in the story a bit hard to follow (but, then, I was reading it poolside, so perhaps it was just me...).

For fans of the genre, I recommend both of Battles' books. ( )