May 21, 2007 By Gil Reavill - Reviewed Terri Schlichenmeyer 3 min read

Over the years, you’ve watched enough TV to know what happens at a murder scene. An investigator comes in and pokes around. Then somebody totes the body away, nice and neat in a big grey bag strapped to a gurney. The police arrive to dust for fingerprints while the MEs do their thing back in the lab. Before the hour is up, the murder is solved, and the case is cleaned up, literally and figuratively.

Just like real life, right?

Nope.

Real life is seldom neat, and neither is death. In the new book “Aftermath, Inc.” by Gil Reavill, you’ll read about what happens when CSI is d-o-n-e.

As a crime reporter for a national men’s magazine, Gil Reavill realized that he was repeatedly missing part of the story. Although his articles were about violence and murder, he’d never actually seen the scene of a crime. He wrote, based only on police reports and interviews. Wanting to see the result of crime on a deeper level, Reavill contacted the Chicago firm of Aftermath, a bioremediation company that specializes in “crime scene and tragedy cleanup”.

His first assignment, as he shadowed the team: cleaning up a three-week comp near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Three week comp: shorthand for “cleaning up an apartment in which someone died and laid, unfound, for three weeks”.

Although that first death scene cleanup tested his gag-reflex and his resolve, Reavill watched while the team tore up the carpet, hauled out furniture and floorboards, ripped out contaminated bits of building and boxes. While there was no body, there was plenty to indicate that a body had once been there.

Suppressing his own body’s urge to retch, Reavill stayed at that first job, and many more for the next few months. He helped haul out bio-boxes in the wake of suicides and murders. He heard about remediation of a house where a police-and-gunman stand-off meant liberal use of toxic pepper spray. He learned how to protect himself from the bloodborne pathogens HIV and HCV. And, in the aftermath of his time with Aftermath, he writes about a people who have been cleaning up bodies and bodily fluids for centuries.

Do you like to read while you eat lunch? Bring a novel with you instead, and leave this book for another time. “Aftermath, Inc.” is very heavy on the eeeeuuuuwww-factor, filled with descriptions of death, violence, murder, mayhem, disease and decay. Suffice it to say that author Gil Reavill felt need to place a warning before Chapter One.

Still, I enjoyed this book in a semi-voyeuristic fashion and, believe it or not, it occasionally made me laugh. Reavill isn’t afraid to poke fun at his own squeamishness in a sheepishly self-protecting way. His recounting of remediation is respectful to readers and victims and, I suspect, not as detailed as it could have been.

If you’re curious-but-not-dainty, a true-crime fan, or if you believe that TV is a real representation of life, “Aftermath, Inc.” is a book you’ll be dying to read.

Just not during your lunch hour.