Monday, November 16, 2015

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes


My third attempt at reading Book 51 finally succeeded as I managed to plough through The Shining Girls but I didn't think much of it.



As everyone knows by now my pet hate in books is a serial killer/maverick detective novel which seem to be churned out in their droves and are all alike. This one took a while to evolve into a story but basically The Shining Girls is yet another book which conforms to this pattern of a madman driven to kill endless women being tracked down by a rookie reporter who was also one of his victims, but who managed to escape.

The only plot element which varies from the standard script is that this killer can travel in time, so selects his victims when they are young children and comes back to kill them once they are grown up. Consequently the book jumps around from decade to decade and it took me quite a while to actually get to grips with what was going on.

Suffice to say the maverick journalist gets in all sorts of trouble and breaks lots of rules but eventually tracks the killer down, despite his ability to travel in time. All very tedious and The Shining Girls only gets 3 out of 10.

Next I continue with the Large Print section, and a non-fiction book from bookcase 55.



Money is actually the first book I might actually pick to read for quite some time. I read a similar book The Secret Life of Money on bookcase 26. I was a bit disappointed by The Secret Life of Money because it was too incoherent with lots of unconnected essays. Hopefully Money will explain the nature of the beast a bit better to me.

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