The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

I picked up this book because I was in the mood for a time travel story, and that's basically all I knew about it going in. The concept of a time-hopping serial killer sounded pretty promising, but unfortunately The Shining Girls doesn't do enough with it, and the various characters and time periods become jumbled.

The book is written in third person but each chapter is from a different point of view; from protagonist Kirby Mazrachi to her friend Dan the detective, to the killer named Harper Curtis, and a few inconsequential side characters, we get their name and what date the chapter takes place on. Sometimes alternating with multiple voices can be beneficial to a story, but in this case it all seemed scattered. I can say that Beukes did admirable research into the details of Chicago's different time periods, but that doesn't make the story great.

All we learn about the Depression-era drifter Harper is that he loves to slice up people with his knife. He has a list of women living in different years who he feels are destined to meet their end, but he also indiscriminately kills anyone who gets in his way, and then jumps to another time before anyone knows how the massacre occured.

Kirby is the one victim who survives Harper's attack because her dog gets in the way of his knife. So she is trying to track Harper down with Dan's help, all while a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Tribune is doing a profile about Kirby and the life-changing assault. Kirby is not a fully dimensional character either, only motivated by wanting justice to be served to the would-be murderer who left ugly scars on her belly.

I'm going to admit my mind wandered while reading this book, because the constantly shifting perspectives and decades became confusing. (This is probably why I'll never be a professional reviewer.) It didn't seem to be clearly explained how Harper was able to time travel other than using a portal somewhere, or why he has the list of victims he calls the "shining girls". (According to Wikipedia, he "must murder the 'shining girls' in order to continue his travels." I didn't pick up on that and I still don't see why continuing to time travel is a good enough reason to become a serial killer.)

So I didn't find much to recommend about The Shining Girls. It felt like it was clumsily building to some greater purpose that never came about, all elaborate table-setting with no feast.