Like many little kids, I went through a fierce Egyptology phase. It culminated with me building a miniature City of the Dead in my backyard (okay, so maybe most kids don't go that far), and died a quick, painful death involving a book about embalming and a bowl of beef stew. I had, up until that point, enjoyed a thoroughly satisfactory relationship with beef stew: it wasn't my favorite food by any stretch of the imagination, but unless my parents forced the issue of carrots, I ate it without complaint. When the Incident (as I later came to think of it) happened, I was fourteen and had already developed the extremely rude habit of reading during dinner; on that particular day, I was plowing my way through a new book about the life and withered remains of Tutankhamen. It never occurred to me that eating and reading might not always be compatible until I got to the part where the author described removing the brain by poking an instrument up through the nostrils and then pulling bits out.

I looked at the description.

And then I looked at my food.

And then I put the book down, shoved the plate away, and spent the next decade or so dodging beef stew.

My stomach is no longer so easily upset: now that I'm older, True Crime is one of my favorite subjects, and if it comes with the side benefit of a little Forensic Anthropology, so much the better. In fact, I've placidly eaten my way through many a meal while Bones played on the television in all its gooey, Technicolor glory. Which is why when I was browsing my local used bookstore and saw a copy of Gil Reavill's Aftermath, Inc.: Cleaning up after CSI Goes Home, I felt like Christmas had come early. And left bone shards in my stocking.

Sweet!

Aftermath is about a company that, as the title states, cleans up after CSI goes home. After all, the police don't take the blood stains out of your carpet; they just catalog them. To actually get the blood out, you'll need Aftermath, Inc., a company that deals with everything from murder scenes to suicides to that creepy old hoarder who wound up being buried under a pile of magazines from 1977 for three weeks. Aftermath is really cool when Reavill sticks to just describing the company and how its workers go about their business, but it bogs down when he starts to muse about mortality. Note to Reavill? That's not why I'm here. I'm here because when I was eight years old, I found a dead worm and then tried to get my mother to give me enough salt to embalm it; in other words, I'm here because I'm a ghoul. Now get out of my way, because all your maunderings about death are blocking my view of the crime scene.

Despite its flaws, Aftermath is a useful resource for many aspiring crime novelists, because seriously-do you have any idea how much evidence the police just leave there? They're reasonably thorough with known crime scenes, but at places that haven't been labeled as homicides, the Aftermath techs were literally picking up people's teeth and throwing them out with the trash. Well, not really, they're very good about biohazards, but my point is that everything winds up being incinerated.

Teeth! Fluids! All that sweet, sweet evidence! Gone!

Now, Hollywood has already gotten into the crime scene cleanup zone with Sunshine Cleaning, but as per typical, they turned it into some sort of weird coming-of-age story. I know that y'all can do better. Give me a book about a tech who realizes that what they're cleaning up is not a suicide or death-by-magazine. And make it really super-extra gross. For me.

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Deb Sigorile is an intern and research assistant with The Editorial Department. She compiled an excellent list of resources for mystery and crime writers, and continues to share her findings here.