Title: The Shining Girls
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: AudioGo
Publication Date: August 13, 2013
ISBN: 9781478952152
Number of Pages: 375 (in hardcover)
How I Got It: Library
Format: Audio CD
Goodreads Description:
The Time Traveler's Wife meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in this story of a time-traveling serial killer who is impossible to trace—until one of his victims survives.
In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back.
Working with an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery.
The Shining Girls is a masterful twist on the classic serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing girl in pursuit of a deadly criminal.(less)
My Review:
I saw this on a lot of reading lists last year and missed it. I saw the eye-catching cover at the library and thought I'd give it a try. I'm glad I chose the audio format because I believe I would have given up if I was reading this story. I'm comfortable with multiple characters and story lines, even large spans of time, but this story had those plus time travel. In all fairness, I knew this when I began listening but the problem was that I couldn't understand the chronology of the killer's days. I'm sure this was deliberate disorientation on the part of the author to parallel the unlikely clues and search for the killer, but it was a bit too jumbled. In different hypothetical situations, I've wondered what I would do if I won the lottery, could hold a dinner party with famous people, or could time travel. I think that most people would do somewhat similar things to me but this novel poses the option of someone choosing quite differently than me or you. If I was time traveling back and forth between 1990's Chicago and 1930's Chicago, I would have bought the "magic house" in this novel with the "magic money" so that I'd be sitting pretty on a great real estate investment right now. But Harper Curtis wants to kill women then jump back into his "magic house" to evade police.
I was interested throughout the novel's entirety but I wasn't excited to continue like so many other great audio options.
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