The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. From the publisher - A fascinating, incredible true story about the person who spends her life cleaning up after traumas. Do you know who cleans up a murder scene? It’s not the police or the paramedics. It’s people like Sandra Pankhurst, a trauma cleaner for whom death and decay are a part of life. Sandra’s trauma work includes crime scenes and floods, real estate agents, executors of deceased estates, and charitable organizations. All call on Sandra to deal with lonely deaths, suicides or cases of long-term property neglect, where homes have fallen into disrepute due to the occupier’s mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, aging, or physical disability. Sandra comes to know her clients as well as they know themselves; she airs out their smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes. She does not, however, erase these people. She couldn’t. She has experienced their same sorrows. This is the fascinating true story of what happens after disaster; what happens when the dust clears and all that’s left is a mess to clean up? You call Sandra, who arrives to make order out of chaos.

My morbid sense of curiosity led me to this book --- when my neighbour died over the summer and they did not find her for five days my first thought was "YUCK" shortly followed by "Oh that's what that smell was and how do they clean up after such a hot-weather-melting-into-the-carpet disaster? The movie Sunshine Cleaning touched on it a bit but this book was disturbingly fascinating. gross and entirely readable at the same time. Great for those with morbid curiosity (like readers of Caitlin Doughty's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes") or just an information junkie like myself. FIVE SOLID STARS. and the tag #frickin-awesome-books