Synopses & Reviews
The girls who wouldn't die hunts the killer who shouldn't exist.
"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.
Review
"Intriguing...Beukes deals with slightly surreal things in very real ways. I'm all over it." Gillian Flynn, O magazine
Review
"A grisly crime thriller meets sci-fi action meets historical fiction in a wildly inventive summer page-turner." Entertainment Weekly
Review
"One of the scariest and best-written thrillers of the year, not to mention the most memorable portrait of a serial killer since Henry H. Holmes in...Erik Larson's 2003 nonfiction bestseller The Devil in the White City." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"A triumph....[T]he smart and spunky Kirby Mizrachi is as exciting to follow as any in recent genre fiction....[E]ach chapter in which [Harper] appears holds a reader's attention, especially the sharply described murder scenes — some of which read as much like starkly rendered battlefield deaths out of Homer as forensic reconstructions of terrible crimes....This book means business." NPR.org
Review
"[Beukes is] so profusely talented — capable of wit, darkness, and emotion on a single page — that a blockbuster seems inevitable....The Shining Girls marks her arrival as a major writer of popular fiction." USA Today
About the Author
Lauren Beukes is a recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, finished runner-up to Lev Grossman for the John W. Campbell Award, was shortlisted for a plethora of other awards and received rave reviews from around the world including The New York Times and The Guardian. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her husband and her daughter.