The Cleaner
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
It’s not dust she’s looking for . . . it’s dirt.
Esmie is meant to be invisible. A cleaner for an exclusive gated neighborhood in Ireland, Esmie fades into the background, slipping in and out of kitchens and closets, quietly observing her clients’ perfect domestic lives. These entitled families only see a quiet woman with a mop in hand, who speaks with an accent they don’t bother to place, and this is exactly what she wants.
Esmie is well aware that her employers don’t truly see her. To them, she’s a foreigner who cleans up their messes. But there’s one mess she refuses to clean up. Because Esmie is not a cleaner. She’s come to this neighborhood for one purpose and one purpose only. Revenge. Armed with a duster and a cunning plan, Esmie could soon find herself entangled with the very people she came to destroy.
The Cleaner exposes the dark underbelly of a protected society, revealing the dirty truths that lie beneath its polished facades of privilege.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this propulsive, fairy tale–inspired adult debut from YA author Watson (Blood to Poison), Esmie Lorenzo arrives in Ireland on a mission to identify and exact revenge on the lover whose betrayal transformed her brother, Nico, from golden neuroscience grad student into a drug-addicted shell of a man lying comatose in their unidentified homeland. To start, Esmie heads to the Woodlands, an exclusive enclave outside Dublin where Nico rented a room from New Agey young widow Ceanna. She manages to finagle a job as a temporary cleaner for Ceanna and her two neighbors, and is soon sifting through an embarrassment of dirt on the cul-de-sac's privileged denizens. At the same time, Esmie ducks a barrage of threatening texts apparently from Nico's enraged fiancée, Simone, back home. As the time-jumping narrative takes increasingly surprising turns—with adultery, drug-dealing, and murder entering the frame—it soon becomes clear that Esmie is hiding some game-changing secrets of her own. Though several characters never develop beyond glossy soap opera archetypes, Watson's vivid sense of place and devious plotting make her a writer worth keeping tabs on. It's a hair-raising good time.
