The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The one thing that impresses me the most about this book is the sheer ambition.

I mean, it's a Mystery cat-and-mouse game told from killer who can hop through time from Depression Era through the early nineties, getting his depraved game of meeting little "shining" girls and coming back moments later when they're all grown up to brutally murder them.

And then we also get a heavily researched and deeply characterized slew of female victims that reads more like a brilliant historical novel than what could have been a few hops and slashes with vague settings... No. Beukes does all her research and does it right. I'm damn impressed.

The rest of the plot is still a cat-and-mouse from the PoV of a girl who had gotten away, learned to live with being eviscerated, and who set herself on the path of piecing together this mystery killer against all odds, getting in tight with an ex-murder-investigator and badgering him to death and often not succeeding. :)

All told, I'm very impressed. It's all about the characters, the settings, and absolutely hating the bastard time-travelling murderer.

I totally recommend this to anyone who's a fan of both mystery and time-travel. :) There's a lot of gory goodness.

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