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Feb 27, 2009

Karen rated it:

I was browsing in Barnes and Noble and this book screamed "Buy Me!!!"

I, for the most part, completely ate it up. I loved hearing about the gory details and it's simply fascinating that someone has a job doing crime scene clean up. It's nothing I ever thought about before. Alan Emmins is a slick writer and I really felt like I was right there in the moment with him, discovering the crime scenes.

Although I thought it was an interesting case, the multiple chapters More...

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Mar 14, 2009

Jan rated it:

A great book! The book deals with an unusual subject in a sensitive way. Graphic at times, but the author pulls back when needed with compassion and feeling for the victims.
Mr. Emmins is amazed with Americans who do not take care of their neighbors or look in on their own relatives, as all of us should. I'm amazed, too. He writes of a country obsessed with CSI television that needs to be turned off. The court case throughout was especially enlightening and sad.
A few quotes were mor More...

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Jan 26, 2012

Christiane rated it:

Who cleans up after a car wreck, suicide, or murder? Not the police...and hopefully not the grieving family. This book focuses on Neal Smither, head of California-based Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. Smither mainly comes across as a big asshole, but he managed to take an idea that everyone scoffed at and turn it into a highly profitable business. And he’s still right in there scrubbing the blood off the walls alongside his employees.
Journalist Emmins, who lives in almost crime-free Denmark More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 25, 2009

Evelyn rated it:

Journalist Alan Emmins profiles Neil Smither, the owner and CEO of Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc., in this wacky, irreverant look at the horrifyingly gruesome world of the detritus left behind from murders, accidents and suicides that happen everyday.

In a nutshell, Neil's company enters the room when the CSI techs leave. In blunt words he tells how he removes baseboards to get any blood that might have seeped under them, checks for brain splatter on the ceilings, and disposes of person More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2012

Jerry rated it:

Well, certainly this wasn't something I had thought about before! learning new stuff is all important and this kind of fits the bill. It is a very entertaining, easy read. Emmins has done a great job articulating the month or so that he spent with one individual (and his company) who cleans up crime scenes, suicide scenes and generally horrible clean up jobs.

As I say, entertaining and amazing what these guys have to put up with. The story is well told with one in particular that run More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 24, 2012

Stan added it

I see why the writer didnt make it as journalist , didnt make it as writer either ,
hes got a good subject probably a lot of good stories , just cant relate it to the page or reader

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 24, 2009

Martha rated it:

Call me a rubbernecker, go ahead, but I liked it! This isn't start-to-finish gore and one messy cleanup after another, though there is enough of that going on. As Emmins follows a crime scene cleaner through several weeks at his job he takes the time to inspect his own attitudes about death. Would he ever kill himself? How would he like to go? What part does media play in our attitudes toward crime-related death? How do I want my body disposed of?

I didn't feel guilty about bei More...

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Oct 21, 2010

Kimberly rated it:

I was not sure what to expect from this book. Would it be one gruesome story after another about crime scene clean up? How can that stay interesting for 300 pages?

If was definitely more than that. It was almost as if the clean up and the gore was the side story, and the real story was about the people doing the clean up, the characters Alan met along the way, and the back story of victim.

We never think about who cleans up after us when we die. There are so many ways to die, a More...

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Apr 23, 2009

Steven rated it:

Engrossing subject matter, believe me. Hard to put down! This is a good first-person account by a narrator squeamish enough to be an "everyman" to any reader. (He regularly has to run out of jobsites to throw up.) The book focuses on three things, the first is the creator of the "Crime Scene Cleaners" business, a gifted, sometimes outrageous personality whose words and ideas easily carry the book: "This what I do, Alan. I wake up every morning and pray for death!" More...

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Aug 10, 2010

David rated it:

Neal Smither and his business, Crime Scene Cleaners, are great material for a book, but are they enough material? The answer is yes and no. Author Alan Emmins had enough material for a great book, but that book would have been only 60% as long as this one. Instead, he turns backflips padding his way to a bloated word count, and you can actually pinpoint the moments where he first becomes desperate and then gives up. Desperate: Beginning on page 181, he drops in a chapter on cryonics--materi More...

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Jul 05, 2009

Jamie rated it:

When I first saw this book I thought this would be an interesting book to read about what goes on in the world of Crime Scene Cleaners. What I didn't know is what I was getting myself into upon reading this.

Alan Emmins takes you into the world of Neal Smither and his company Crime Scene Cleaners. Not only does Emmins tell of the gruesome details of cleaning a crime scene, but he manages to keep you interested at the same time. With Neal Smither's weird and sometimes jaw dropping joke More...

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Dec 11, 2008

Anne rated it:

A very entertaining look at the crime scene cleaning business. I have to admit there is some part of my that loves to read about anything CSI, including the cleaning up of anything left at the scene (blood, guts, and gore).

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 19, 2010

Laren rated it:

After shadowing the owner of a cleaning company specializing in crime scenes, suicides and other unusual cleaning situations, the author writes a magazine article about it. But upon reflection, he starts to feel that he might have missed the real story, so he goes back to investigate more intensely, and this book is the result.

The author paints clear portraits of the people he shadows, and the book provides a glimpse into several different scenarios from their daily world. Less suc More...

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Mar 23, 2010

Shawna rated it:

This is the second book I've read about crime scene cleaners. It had the requisite gory stories and moral abiguity of making money/being curious about such a business. The main hook of the book was a case of a man who had murdered an older gentleman he was staying with and then proceeded to live in the man's apartment for a month while the body deteriorated. This led to, what I considered to be the weakest part of the book, basically a transcript of the presumed killer's pretrial hearing, whi More...

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Mar 07, 2011

Susan rated it:

Extremely quick read, and extremely entertaining to boot. Considering the subject matter, I was never grossed out or thought that the gore descriptions were gratuitous. One comment: The author is an Englishman who lives in Denmark. I used to work closely with an old co-worker who was a Dane who lived in Copenhagen, and so the style of speech and the mannerisms were familiar. If you don't have the good luck to have that experience, however, some of his thoughts and ideas may seem a bit off to you More...

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Aug 03, 2011

Morgan rated it:

I hesitate to say that I enjoyed this book. I did find it difficult to put down once I started reading, however, there are quite a few spelling and grammar errors that made me twitchy, and it didn't exactly live up to what the title seemed to promise. I was expecting stories about crime scenes and the cleanup in great detail, and while there was some of that, it shifted back and forth to seemingly unrelated things which I had trouble understanding the point of, in the context of the story.
More...

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Feb 11, 2011

Lori rated it:

I was one chapter from finishing Mop Men yesterday when my condo flooded -- burst pipe from next door leaking thousands of gallons of water into my home. As I sucked up all I could with a ShopVac, all I could think was, "At least it's not blood." Alan Emmis and his subjects, Neal Smither and Crime Scene Cleaners, had me seeing the bright side.

Which is funny, because the book is simultaneously about the gory and the light, the lost and the hopeful. The folks who do these job More...

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Oct 08, 2009

Jo rated it:

Interesting topic for a book as I'd never really given much thought before as to who cleans up a messy death once the crime investigators are done with the scene. Rather educational and a bit gruesome in parts. The author also explores current society's attitude towards death and for some reason seemed to keep an eye on the elections in California (not sure how relevant that was!). My only bugbear is that for a journalist, Emmins does not have a great grasp on the English language as the book is More...

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Nov 19, 2009

Martha rated it:

this book is about Crime Scene Cleanup, a company who does exactly what the title implies. it takes a certain kind of person to be able to stay in the business...it ain't a pretty one. it would be so easy to turn this into one grisly tale after another. but the author does a wonderful job of presenting this crew of men who carry out this work with care, dignity and compassion. it's a fascinating read. but keep in mind, there are some graphic details about some of the jobs. there's your disclaime More...

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Nov 26, 2010

Kristin rated it:

A good book, but not the best I've read on the topic. The writing was fine and the subject matter made interesting, there was just something missing that I can't put my finger on.
Part of it was the author himself, who seemed to be making the book more about him than the company. I understood he was a journalist from another country with no experience in viewing crime scenes prior to working on this piece, but he kept reminding readers and using up space that should have been about Crime Sc More...

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Jan 24, 2012

Kirk rated it:

"Since hanging around with the Crime Scene Cleaners, I have been giving serious thought to the choice of method by which people put an end to their own lives, and what these methods say about them."

NOTE: This review may contain SPOILERS.

Mop Men: Inside The World Of Crime Scene Cleaners by Alan Emmins. This is a fascinating book. If you have ever wondered who has to clean up after a messy murder or a suicide involving blood splatter then you might want to crack More...

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Sep 06, 2009

Scotchneat rated it:

The writing style wasn't quite what I expected. Emmins is a British journalist who chronicles the work of Neal Smither, a professional cleaner in California. A professional cleaner of crime scenes.

If you like detail on how one might go about cleaning up a putrefying body in a bathtub, then this is your book.

Smither is quite a character, a mix of unabashed entrepreneur, Mr Bravado and family man. He is, above all however, a hard worker who takes pride in his business.
More...

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Jun 27, 2009

Tracey rated it:

Adult nonfiction. A few months ago I enjoyed Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, about a guy who falls into the messy business of crime scene cleanup, so I thought I'd read this journalist's account of his experiences and interviews with guys that really do the work. It was interesting, but not as engaging as Huston's fictionalized version, which turned out to be a pretty accurate portrayal of the business, apart from the ongoing violence between clean-up gangs that w More...

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Aug 02, 2011

Kim rated it:

Amazing.

This book literally blew me away. I read it back around Christmas last year, and I'm still raving about it to my friends, trying to get them to read it too. It's a look at an industry surrounding the criminal justice system, something that not many people tend to consider. I don't want to give too much of it away, but if you like reading about the glorified crime teams that are solving cases, I'll bet you'll love reading about how the mess gets cleaned up at the end of the day.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 22, 2011

JesiMarie rated it:

The writing style is awesome. Considering what the book is about, Emmins really keeps it up beat and funny. Unfortunately, it kind of turns into a drag to read. It's basically the same thing over and over. There are parts that don't need to be there, and really, it's just repetitive. Emmins does and awesome job of making you feel like you're there and he portrays the people he met so vibrantly that you feel like you're actually talking to them and know them. It should have been shorter though, i More...

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May 21, 2011

Tara rated it:

Emmins spent way too much time talking about himself, and the rest of the book would be more accurately characterized as a character study of Neal. Not at all what I was hoping the book would actually be about, which is the actual "world of crime scene cleaners" (the profession), not Crime Scene Cleaners (aka Neal), the business/man that Emmins hero-worships for no evident reason. It also reads like a magazine feature article that was expanded to a full-length book through the addition More...

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Sep 30, 2009

Vicky rated it:

I'm a morbid gorehound, so this book is right up my alley. Unfortunately, it's written in that slightly breathless, snarky style common in men's magazines, which I find intensely irritating. There's very little actual description of the people and the work involved and far too much information about the writer himself. The job Crime Scene Cleaners do is extremely interesting; Emmins has managed to make it sound boring, which is no mean feat.

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May 25, 2009

Cory rated it:

Probably not the wisest decision to read this book mostly while I was eating, because it was rather gruesome. However, it was also fascinating, and quite well-written. Yes, it did get a little self-important at parts . . . looking for deep meaning where there might not have been any, but it was still really good. We tend not to think of how crime scenes and suicides get cleaned up, so this behind-the-scenes look was very interesting.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 10, 2010

Hana rated it:

Fascinating look at what it takes to clean up a death site. The book isn't just about cleaning up crime scenes...there are also enounters following road accident as well as what happens wrt bodies left too long in a final resting place. Most interesting was the struggle to start the business...but once underway...it became extremely profitable. Downloaded to my Kindle...a good read. Hats off/big salute to people who do this work.

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Jul 17, 2009

Rachel rated it:

Fun book! Bogged down a bit in the last third, when the author tries to draw big conclusions about death and society's obsession with it. His hero worship of Neal, the owner of Crime Scene Cleaners, is kind of cute. The book is definitely gory, though for some reason this didn't affect me as much as it does on CSI-type TV shows. I think this would be a fun poolside read - it's a book you don't have to think about too much.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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