The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes

"The girl who wouldn’t die – hunting a killer who shouldn’t exist.

In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras, leaving anachronistic clues on their bodies, until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and turns the hunt around."

A bizarre little beauty of a book, this time travel serial killer murder mystery who-dunnit, is, as that description suggests, a mish-mash of all sorts of genres that shouldn't really work but do.

The story itself is lithely written, racing along at a solid pace. Both the heroine, Kirby, and the villain, Harper, are terrifically written, with neither given the treatment of flawlessness; Harper is a monster, but also a victim of circumstance, petty, vindictive, cruel and murderous, but also weighed down upon by the House, and his own half-created destiny. Kirby is broken, but rarely sympathetic, she's shattered into cold edges, and like Gone Girl this a story of flawed human beings who often exert little in the way of humanity.

Trotting between eras, the real skill of The Shining Girls is in picking out victims that do pull at the herat strings; Harper's task, to kill off women with something exceptional about them is horrifyingly, cruelly misogynistic and utterly readable. In choosing such an obviously 'good' group to target Beukes removes the need to make them 'good' people; their lives are testament to that, and so Kirby's own flaws mean very little compared to what she could have been. Her survival is in a world that she is out of place in, her achievements after are through a prism of her broken nature.

Really enjoyable book. Perfect thriller.

Also Try:
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Travelers Wife
Robert Harris, Silence of the Lambs
Dean Koontz, From The Corner of His Eye

Eon, Greg Bear

"Above our planet hangs a hollow Stone, vast as the imagination of Man. The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer: there are different chambers to be breached, some even containing deserted cities. The furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stone's scientists.

But tombstone or milestone, the Stone is not an alien structure: it comes from the future of our humanity. And the war that breaks out on Earth seems to bear witness to the Stone's prowess as oracle . . ."










If Through Darkest America was unsure whether it wanted to be post-apocalyptic, civil-war epic, Western or teen drama, Eon at least has the virtue of not needing to choose what it is by being everything to all things. It's big sci-fi, hard sci-fi, in the classic vein, with a plot that is followable but not necessarily understandable for all the right reasons.

When the cold war is interrupted by the arrival of a massive meteor, orbiting the Earth, science teams are sent to investigate. At which point every expectation about what's coming next breaks down as Bear decides to just skip over the bits you assume will come next, like the initial reaction to the stone's arrival, or the consequences of a world-ending nuclear war.

This is not a story that's afraid to hit its audience over the head thematically, but it's in the actual science that things can go a bit off the deep end. When your main character is an experimental physicist so brilliant a civilisation literally centuries ahead needs her mind to advance their science you know there's not going to be too much slowing down for the kids at the back to keep up. And so it proves, as the book seeks to set up a mathematical concept allowing a TARDIS to hijack a space rock out of its dimension and back through time. And then there's a space war. Everyone in the book is 'brilliant' in their own way, which can be distracting but is probably more fair in the context of a top secret scientific exploration of future-tech and alien activity.

It makes very little sense but is terrific fun, and works as a wonderful example of truly well thought out xenofiction, up there with anything in the Ender's Game books (a series which did very well at imagining lots of very alien species).

It also has a couple of sequels which I won't be hunting out but would certainly read if I came across them.

Also Try;
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
K. A. Applegate, The Ellimist Chronicles