Broken Monsters

New York: Mulholland Books (Little, Brown and Company), 2014. First North American Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Ross Shields (Jacket photographs) and Ulrick Knobl. [6], 442 pages. Autographed copy sticker on the front of the DJ. Signed and dated by the author on the title page. A Novel by the Author of The Shining Girls. Lauren Beukes (born 5 June 1976) is a South African novelist, short story writer, journalist and television scriptwriter. As a journalist, her articles have been published in a wide range of local and international magazines including The Hollywood Reporter, Nature Medicine and Colors as well as The Sunday Times Lifestyle, Marie Claire, Elle, Cosmopolitan and SL Magazine. She won "Best Columnist Western Cape" in the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards in 2007 and 2008. Broken Monsters is a show-stopping story of a city trying to rise from its own ashes, its inhabitants struggling with their own demons, and a monster working to shape the world to match his most disturbing visions. It's beautiful, horrifying, thrilling, and most impressive of all, possessed of a deep and remarkable compassion. Broken Monsters charges into the present day with an eye-opening thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again. Broken Monsters is a brilliant genre-defying thriller that breathes humanity and compassion for its rich, complex characters even as it gives you a hair-raising, nail-biting ride through gritty inner-city Detroit. Derived from a Kirkus review: A genuinely unsettling—in all the best ways—blend of suspense and the supernatural makes this a serial-killer tale like you've never seen. Set in a crumbling contemporary Detroit, Beukes' fourth novel seamlessly alternates between the points of view of a single mother homicide detective; her 15-year-old daughter; a wannabe journalist; a homeless man; and an artist with deep-seated psychological issues. At the scene of the crime, Detective Gabriella Versado can't remember the last time she's seen something so brutal: The top half of 11-year-old Daveyton Lafonte is fused with the hind legs of a fawn in a hideous display of human taxidermy. While it's obvious that the five storylines will eventually join together, Beukes never takes the easy route, letting each character develop organically. Versado's daughter, Layla, cautiously navigates high school in the digital age; homeless scavenger Thomas "TK" Keen warily patrols the streets; Detroit transplant Jonno Haim tries to make a name for himself by chronicling first the city's art scene and then the hunt for the killer dubbed the Detroit Monster; and sculptor Clayton Broom's creations begin to take on lives of their own. Versado's dogged pursuit of the killer, under the glare of the media spotlight, is as compelling a police procedural narrative as Broom's descent into madness and the horrors of his dream world are a truly terrifying horror story. The monsters in her latest tale, whether they're real or imagined, will keep you up all night.