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Joe Middleton works as a janitor for the Christchurch (New Zealand) Police Department. Referred to as "Slow Joe," few would suspect that he is anything other than a mentally challenged young man doing a job that suits his abilities. And absolutely no one would believe that he is the "Christchurch Carver," a serial killer who has seven victims under his belt. Or so the police believe. Joe knows that he has only killed six women. He's determined to find out who killed the seventh, Daniela Walker, so that he can arrange the evidence for that person to be blamed for all the murders. You see, Joe isn't nearly as mentally challenged as he pretends to be. It serves his purposes to be considered dim—such a person could never be a threat. At the same time, his work allows him to access information on the killings, which proves helpful. Joe lives on his own with his pet goldfish, Pickle and Jehovah. His mother exerts an outsized influence on him. She is a demanding woman who can only find fault with her son. He professes to love her—but why does he put rat poison in her tea and grease her bathtub? He dissociates himself from those acts. The one person who actually cares about Joe is a co-worker, Sally, who is a maintenance worker. Sally blames herself for the death of her mentally challenged brother, and she sees Joe as a kind of replacement, a person who she can actually help. Joe sees Sally as a pain in the butt, not realizing that she is the person who saved his life after he was attacked by a woman he had targeted as a victim. Actually, Joe views Sally as being the one who is mentally challenged. “You should join me for lunch by the river,” she says…. How much fun I'd have as the other people walk by looking at one person pretending to be retarded while the other pretends to be normal. We could throw bread at the ducks and tell each other which clouds look like pirate ships and which look like the bloated corpses of drowning victims. I really liked THE CLEANER, a book quite unlike anything I've read before. Forget about the usual serial killer clichés—Joe has definitely been damaged by his relationship with his mother, but there is no hokey psychology around that situation. Joe picks his victims and matter of factly kills them. There's no before-or-after anguish, other than when he offs Fluffy the cat. The humor is black; Joe would commit a horrendous murder and I would find myself laughing at how he reacted. How could I like a serial killer who kills for fun and in totally gruesome ways? That's part of Cleave's genius, to have you care about a man who should be totally unlikeable. The other aspect of the book that is praiseworthy is how Cleave manages to have Joe and Sally so completely misunderstand one another. THE CLEANER is an innovative book, dark and quirky. There are quite a few twists along the way, and I particularly liked the way the book concluded. At times, THE CLEANER is quite disturbing; on the other hand, it is also fascinating and the humor helps make it all palatable. § Formerly a training development manager for a large company, Maddy is now retired and continues to enable the addiction of crime fiction fans as owner of the online discussion group, 4 Mystery Addicts(4MA), while avidly reading in every possible free moment herself.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, November 2012
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