The Cleaner
Written by Brett Battles
Narrated by Scott Brick
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Meet Jonathan Quinn: a freelance operative with a take-no-prisoners style and the heart of a loner. His job? Professional "cleaner." Nothing too violent, just disposing of bodies. But in Brett Battles's electrifying debut novel, Quinn's latest assignment will change everything.
The job seemed simple enough: investigating a suspicious case of arson. But when a dead body turns up-and Quinn's handlers at "the Office" turn strangely silent-he knows he's in over his head. With only a handful of clues, Quinn struggls to find out why someone wants him dead . . . and if it's linked to a larger attempt to wipe out the Office.
Quinn's only hope may be Orlando, a woman from his past who may hold the key to solving the case. Suddenly the two are prying into old crimes, crisscrossing continents, and struggling to stay alive. But as the hunt intensifies, Quinn is stunned by a chilling secret . . . and a brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy.
Furiously paced, filled with superbly drawn characters and pitch-perfect dialogue, The Cleaner confirms Battles's place as one of the most exciting new talents in suspense fiction.
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Reviews for The Cleaner
172 ratings13 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5First book in the series, the prequel “Becoming Quinn” is what lead me to read this. A thriller that starts out a little slow maybe 5 pages or so, and then just begins to build. What is the cause, what is the focus you learn as Quinn does, as he puts together the pieces of the mystery. By the end, there have been so many twists and turns in the plot, some I caught an early glimpse of, but most were a surprise. A pedal to the metal, all balls out ride. Recommended!
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I read more than half of this book before abandoning. Scott Brick, as a narrator, is melodramatic. I need to quit reading his stuff. BUT the main problem here was way too much testosterone and way too much romance. And, then, when the author uses a small child as a way to create superheros, I'm done.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love the details of the job of the cleaner and the nonstop heart pounding action. Also has a heck of a twist which I didn't see coming. Proof that you can take me out of the teen library but can't take the teen library out of me--the whole time I'm reading this, I thinking how perfect it would be to give to high school or even middle school guys--violent, definitely, but only when necessary and not gross or explicit, and very little sex or language.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Listened to this on audio. Very enjoyable. I watched a brief episode of the TV show by the same name and for the life of me can't see any resemblance, but maybe that's just me.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I got through half of this before quitting it. Apparently, the protagonist, Jonathan Quinn, is supposed to be a "cleaner," someone who comes in after a hit has been put on someone and clean the place up. But we only see him do that once, and even then, not really. And yet, he seems to have all these special op skills. Plus, people want him dead. While I'm sure why is the point of the book, I just didn't care enough to find out. Disappointing given the reviews.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Many thriller and espionage writers attempt to create their own believable but unique spy agencies, cultures, and operatives. Adam Hall and Ian Fleming did it best with their repective characters - Quiller and James Bond. Brett Battles is less successful. His fictional agency is simply called the Office. Jonathan Quinn is his spy, or operative, or clean-up man - something like that. The plot moves in the right direction but there's a lot of international travel with fake identities, passports and visas apparently just for the sake of having Quinn travel with fake identities, passports, and visas. There's also a lot of gunplay and explosions but in the end it's been done better by others and isn't all that compelling.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This is an ok thriller.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Was 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In 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.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Good reviews led me to buy this as an audio book for a long car ride. It's hard for me to tell how much was the reader's fault and how much was the definitely wooden dialog of the novel. I turned it off about a third of the way through it without listening to the end. That would rate a 1-star from me, but I'm willing to cut Mr. Battles some slack based upon a bad reader and just leave it at, "I didn't enjoy it."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quick read, good entertainment. No literary value. Will keep an eye out for more books by this author.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This started out as one thing; an organized crime novel with a lone hero out for justice of a limited scope, and then changed into an international thriller with global consequences if Quinn failed. Normally I hate this when it happens, but I didn’t in this case. It just seemed to fall into place naturally.Not that it was perfect. The characters are a bit wooden and so was the dialogue. I don’t know if the author’s style is bare to the point of emaciation or if he was just trying to set the character, but I suspect the former since it was more than dialogue that was stripped down to nearly the level that required total imaginative fill-in by the reader. Shit man, give me SOME detail. Quinn’s character did change through the piece though. At first he was the lone operator, tough and master of his own domain. He speaks in one-word orders to his protégé Nate who is in such awe of him that he takes it and barely utters a squeak. But as events play out, Quinn has to make some decisions as to who to trust and learns that trust goes both ways and that he’ll have to learn some new habits. With persistence he convinces Orlando to help him figure out why The Office was destroyed and why he was targeted even though he is a freelancer and not truly on the Office’s staff. This leads to Berlin where things escalate into global scope. With much harrowing adventure and near misses, Quinn does prevent disaster. He has help from Orlando who was down, but not out and Nate This could be an interesting series, but I think it would be VERY difficult to keep things fresh and not get bogged down in some debilitating, hokey and ultimately boring romance angle.