The Shining Girls

How's this for an idea: a time-traveling serial killer? Though that sounds like a Hollywood pitch, it is instead the subject of Lauren Beukes The Shining Girls, an intermittently suspenseful book that suffers from from too many cliches.

Our killer is Harper, a man with a sketchy past. But from 1931 to the early '90s, he is able to skip through time, killing women he has singled out because they "shine." First he visits them as younger women, often giving them an object he has purloined from his previous victim in another time. Then he brutally stabs them to death.

He does this by means of a dilapidated house in Chicago. He enters in one time period, and exits in another. None of this is explained, either by natural or supernatural means, and we don't really know his motivation, other than he's crazy.

Harper's plan goes awry when one of his victims, Kirby, survives. She's a spunky Nancy Drew-type who, after recovering, will do everything she can to try to catch him. Of course she's sarcastic and never without a quip. She gets a job at the Sun-Times interning to a sports reporter, just as a cover so she can use the archives to look at other murders where an object was either stolen or left.

This is such a great idea that I was a little disappointed more wasn't done with it. I wanted to know more about the house, but Beukes, either purposely or not, doesn't reveal its secrets. As with all time travel stories, the paradoxes create both problems and intrigue: when Harper first enters the house, he sees the names of the victims written on the wall, in his own handwriting.

Beukes is most successful when she focuses on the women that are killed. She creates mini-portraits of various women such as a burlesque dancer, a single African-American women during World War II, an abortionist, etc., only to have them brutally murdered. It's almost sadistic how she gets the reader interested in the women only to have them horribly snuffed out.

I see two major problems, though. One is the constant cutting back and forth in time, which is almost impossible to follow. I'm sure she had charts keeping track, but I don't have that. She names her victims, but without taking notes it's too much "now which one was she?" Second, I didn't like Kirby at all, which I'm sure was not Beukes' intention. There are too many characters like her in mystery/suspense fiction, who are always sticking their nose where it doesn't belong, getting angry at anyone who doesn't support their actions, and never say anything that isn't sarcastic. At the end, when she pursues Harper into the house, it's like a bad teen slasher movie: "Don't go in the house!"

Still, I recommend this book to those who like serial killer books and time travel books, and the Venn diagram of those that overlap.