"The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless. It has a terrible fury all its own." Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future. Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women, burning with potential, whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a House in Depression-era Chicago that opens on to other times. At the urging of the House, Harper inserts himself into the lives of the shining girls, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He's the ultimate hunter, vanishing into another time after each murder, untraceable - until one of his victims survives. Determined to bring her would-be killer to justice, Kirby joins the Chicago Sun-Times to work with the ex-homicide reporter, Dan Velasquez, who covered her case. Soon Kirby finds herself closing in on the impossible truth.... The Shining Girls is a masterful twist on the serial killer tale: a violent quantum leap featuring a memorable and appealing heroine in pursuit of a deadly criminal. ©2013 Lauren Beukes (P)2013 Hachette Audio



It was almost like I was being told by myself from the future that I was going to really enjoy The Shining Girls. I read the publishers summary and at first didn’t think that much of it, horror not my favorite genre, didn’t have the greatest time following the last time travel audiobook. I let it go for a few days and then BAM, I had to listen to it, pulled to it, with no explanation whatsoever. Now that I am committed to The Shining Girls, one question keeps popping up in my head. How on earth does one catch a time traveling serial killer? Unless you can time travel your self. Time travel stories are always difficult because to the huge opportunity for creating paradoxes. I for one cannot stand a paradox, I am interested to find out how Lauren Beukes handles this. I also wonder how the multiple narrators will play out, I know it is rarely what I think.

If you are using the excuse that you don’t like time traveling stories, that’s too science fiction for me or the like. If you like horrors, thrillers, suspense, crime drama, or detective stories, the The Shining Girls should fit right into your tastes. The Shining Girls blends them all up and spits them back out with a sprinkling of time travel and there you have it, an intense, creepy, disturbing, and hypnotizing tale of a serial killer who happens to be able to travel through time. But not traveling aimlessly like Marty McFly, but with a real purpose, to find and extinguish his shining girls at various stages of their lives. There was very little focus and story building behind how this serial killer is able to travel through time, we are left to wonder, I don’t mind that at all, and the fact that he didn’t really understand made it all the better. I am happy to say if there was a paradox I didn’t find it. If you want to be totally creeped out while getting your time travel fix, you must give The Shining Girls a listen.

The narrator line-up for The Shining Girls is impressive. Jay Snyder and Khristine Hvam I know and were great in their other roles I have listened to, the Ex-Heroes series. Dani Cervone, Joshua Boone, Peter Ganim and Jenna Hellmuth are all new to me. My first thought was that this was going to be some sort of dramatized story, you know multiple narrators at the same time each for a certain character. I was gratefully incorrect on that one. Each chapter was given to a single narrator, using the narrators to define the current point of view and even time period, very helpful for a time traveling story. I must say that all of the narration cast did an excellent job, breathing real life into it. All the narrators performances were exceptionally strong and solid.

About Lauren Beukes Lauren Beukes is a novelist, scriptwriter, comics writer, TV writer and occasional documentary maker and former journalist. She won the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle for her phantamagorical noir, Zoo City, set in a re-imagined Johannesburg. Her previous novel, Moxyland is political thriller about a consumertopia corporate apartheid state where cell phones are used for social control. The Shining Girls, her new novel, due out mid-2013 is about a time-travelling serial killer and the girl who survives his attack and turns the hunt around. She’s also written Fairest: The HIdden Kingdom, a six part mini-series spin-off of Bill Willingham’s Fables for DC/Vertigo, about Rapunzel in Tokyo, with art by Inaki Miranda.

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