I don't know if Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson qualify as heroes, but if they don't I'm not quite sure who does. The company they built to deal with the refuse of crime scenes does a job you never think about, but before they came along there was no one who could turn a blood and gore splattered apartment back into a human habitation...which is much harder to do than you could possibly imagine, unless you've read this grizzly book. If your a crime fan, you'll love this book, and probably should get help. If you're a crime writer, then it's absolutely required reading, but in either case you'll never look at a crime scene the same way again.

Crime writer Gil Reavill rode with the cleanup crews of Aftermath, Inc. and he saw more blood and gore than you can imagine. He saw weird deaths, brutal deaths, senseless deaths, and everywhere he went he found the smell of death, which is not a slight odor you might mistake for bad meat in the fridge, but a stench that it takes high tech ozone scrubbers to remove. For crime writers and readers alike this book it a gold mine of facts about what crime scenes are like, and they're not like anything you've ever seen on TV. If the producers of CSI haven't read this yet, they're missing an important source of hands on information.

But amidst the the biohazard laden environment that the Aftermath crew lives in day in and day out, he found a very powerful sense of the humanity involved in the business of dealing with sudden and terrible death. In one scene he realizes that while he'd known he didn't really know what a crime scene looked like, he'd assumed he'd know grief when he saw it. Until he was confronted by true pain. In balance, he found a community of people who work every day to help find a way for the dead to rest so that those who survive can go on living.

The writing is fast and clean and the people you'll meet are genuine and likeable in an everyday sort of way, except that they deal with a world painted in blood and infectious waste. After a while you may start to think that you've crossed over, like the author into a land where it's all normal. Well, in a way it is. In fact it's a lot more normal than the way most of us live, pretending that no one ever dies until death touches us. Aftermath, Inc. leaves you with no such illusions.

Highly recommends.