The closest analog I've found to describe The Shining Girls is to imagine The Time Traveler's Wife, only with a murderous and violent serial killer at its heart. That's an awesome hook if you're the right kind of person, but more than that, it gives you a sense of just how complex and rich The Shining Girls really is. At its core, The Shining Girls is the story of two people: a serial killer named Harper, whose house propels him through time to kill women whose names he has already/has yet to carve into his walls (the vagaries of time travel are complex here), and Kirby, a young woman who survived his horrific attack and is desperate to track down the madman. But that doesn't prepare you for the dazzling structure of the book, which alternates chapters between the two and follows each of the stories chronologically - which means that we often meet the characters through the other narrator out of that chronology. It all sounds more complicated than it is; indeed, The Shining Girls is easy to follow, but Beukes's time-traveling plotting is incredibly rich and compelling, and her constant teasing of things we know have to happen only increases the already palpable tension that fills the entire book. More than that, Beukes fills the book with rich and interesting characters, and it's not limited to the main characters; the supporting cast is just as good, whether they're a single-scene victim or Kirby's newspaper mentor that ends up becoming the third most important character in the book. The Shining Girls is an intelligent, well-crafted thriller that had me absolutely hooked early on, and my attention never once lagged, all the way to the final chapter that wraps things up in an unexpected and fantastic manner. If you're a thriller fan, it's a joy to find something that's this ambitious and creative, and the fact that The Shining Girls is every bit as good as it first appears makes it even better. Beukes is new to me, but you can bet I'll be checking out more of her books, and I'll be eager to see where she goes from here; if anything else she does is half as dazzling, exciting, and intense as this one is, I'll be a happy reader indeed.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
