Lauren Beukes Broken Monsters
Lauren Beukes is the amazing author who wrote The Shining Girls. If you haven’t read The Shining Girls it was a time traveling, serial killer, paranormal hybrid of a novel. I have spoken about The Shining Girls a million different times and in a million different venues here at THinc. I loved the time travel aspect and even went so far as to keep track of the time travel in a linear fashion.
A criminal mastermind creates violent tableaus in abandoned Detroit warehouses in Lauren Beukes’s new genre-bending novel of suspense.
Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit’s standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?
If you’re Detective Versado’s geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you’re desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you’re Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you’ll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe—and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.
If Lauren Beukes’s internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.
If you are curious as to the level of detail Lauren puts into her novels you can take a peek at my timeline that I pulled together as I was reading The Shining Girls. It should remove any sort of doubt that you may have had for what she is capable of. SPOILERS ABOUND:
The Shining Girls Timeline:
1931 – Harper gave the jacket and key to the blind woman for Bartek.
1931 – Kirby?! – 1st time traveling? Pole is killed by Harper? In the house.
1931 – Harper kills Jeannette Clara
1932 – Harper dislocated jaw, laid up
1932 – Harper takes nurse Etta to the house
1932 – Harper kills Etta in house while Mal watches from closet
1935 – Harper kills man after cheating at poker
1935 – Steals blind woman’s coat finds key
1935 – breaks leg and goes to hospital and finds the house
1935 – enters house and finds his own hand writing of girls’ names
1940 – Alice is a guy?!?
1943 – Zora – killed – leaves baseball card in overalls – takes cooper black letter Z
1951 – Alice jumps off roof and he tosses contraceptive pack after her
1954 – Willie – architect, attacked at office
1972 – Margot is killed after helping with an abortion
1973 – gives circus girl the pony
1980 – Kirby sees him
1984 – Julia madrigal murdered while Kirby had sex?
1988 – Mal
1988 – Harper and Jin sook (Korean)
1989 – Kirby march 23is the attack
1989 – buys flowers to check if she is alive
1991 – Mal steals money from the house
(1992?- Etta (nurse fixed his leg) and doctor killed and put in dumpster?)
1992 – Kirby – referring backwards to the attack
1992 – July 24
1992 – Dan – newspaper guy on homocide covered Kirby’s “murder”
1992 – Dan, flirting with kirby at ballgame
1993 – korean Jin-sook au, killed, leaves pony \ takes baseball card.
Anytime – drag mercy found dead in dumpster
1993 – Catherine, jumps off building(?) hair clip he showed her 8 years prior?
1993 – Musharraf milk wood pharmecuticals.