Kirby should be dead. Attacked by a vicious murderer as a child, she somehow survived and grew up. Now she is an intern at a Chicago newspaper, trawling through crime records to trace her killer. Kirby is convinced she was the victim of a serial killer who has attacked before and will attack again.
And she's right. Harper Curtis attacked her with a knife, has killed before and will kill again. But what Kirby doesn't realise is that Curtis is almost untraceable. He has the perfect getaway vehicle - only in this case it's a house which allows him to roam Chicago through the ages, searching for the "shining girls" he is obsessed by. Curtis can travel forwards and backwards in time, killing and escaping justice.
With this original premise Lauren Beukes has created what I can imagine will be one of 2013's hottest crime fiction picks. It reminded me of Stephen King at his best, merging horror and crime to produce a gripping thriller. The book is very well constructed, following Kirby's quest and Curtis' s rampages simultaneously. In lesser hands this could have been confusing (I confess here to having been terminally confused by The Time Traveller's Wife), but Beukes has clearly planned the novel very carefully and it is easy to follow both storylines.
The book is most satisfying when the "loops" of the storyline close together: when Kirby finds one of Curtis' s victims and pieces together what we as the reader have already seen happen, or when we see Curtis' s viewpoint on the attack on Kirby. The parts of the book following Curtis's murderous outings to the future can be occasionally hard to read; the pity you feel for the victims can make it difficult to read about their horrific deaths at Curtis's hands.
I also really enjoyed the journey through Chicago's history in this novel. Beukes has clearly done her research; we see a travelling circus of the 1940s, a college student in the 80s, a women's liberationist working in an abortion clinic in the 1970s. Having visited Chicago last year on holiday, I found this particularly interesting, and made much more vivid by the precise references to streets and parks Beukes carefully gives us.
This fast-paced thriller deserves to be a summer hit: as a reader you care deeply about Kirby's quest for vengeance on the man who tried to steal her life, and fear Curtis's powers to destroy lives. The novel builds to a thrilling climax, and there's even a hint of romance for Kirby. A precision-made thriller, guaranteed to have you turning pages late into the night, made distinctive by the supernatural element.
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes will be published by Harper Collins on 25 April. I must thank the publishers who kindly provided me with a review copy via Net Galley.
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