More time to kill

Merciless and violent, the serial killer in Lauren Beukes's new novel, The Shining Girls, has a unique power that makes him seemingly impossible to track down; his ability to time travel.

Escaping the law by returning to the strange and terrifying house that is his gateway into another era of Chicago's grim history, Harper Curtis murders his way through the decades, until he gets sloppy and one of his victims survives to hunt him down.

Vividly written and imaginatively conceived, Beukes succeeds in combining thriller and horror with the fantasy of time travel, writing a villain who is chillingly brutal and disarmingly evasive.

Harper is compelled by the house to seek out and kill girls with particular qualities: their bravery, uniqueness and independence makes them shine in his eyes. From each girl he kills, he takes a souvenir which he deposits in a different era, thereby leaving impossible clues for his pursuers to solve. Harper visits his victims in their childhoods to give them foreboding gifts which mark their terrible fates.

Kirby Mazrachi is different. When she survives the attack, she sets out to avenge herself by finding her attacker. She enlists the help of Dan, a burned out ex-homicide reporter turned sports journalist, and the man who covered her case.

Beukes structures the book around this girl, who refuses to remain a victim. We meet her in childhood at the start of the book, when Harper is setting her up for the later ambush by giving her an orange toy pony, saying: ''Now keep this safe, all right? It's real important. I'll come to get it. You understand."

The six-year-old throws the toy away, but goes back for it later, and the stage is set for a narrative that sets hairs standing on end.

Beukes won critical acclaim: the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle for her ''phantamagorical noir"Zoo City, set in Johannesburg crawling with people who possess strange powers. In this book she tests her research skills by providing insightful historical details for the victims, each from a different era. The date and a name signal each new chapter as the novel flips through time.

At a launch of her new book, Beukes revealed that she had set up a time line at home, much like those seen in police investigative television dramas, to help her keep track of the details of her story.

Each victim is only a spectre in the narrative, and yet each is sharply defined. A stripper from the 1930s, slowly dying from radium poisoning, is an imaginative comment from Beukes on the strange mores of that time, while the abortion activist from 1972 reminds us of the prevalent issues of that era.

Beukes holds the many strands of the book together with her punchy, fast-paced prose. She manages to distil the essence of each historical timeframe into the characters she describes, while maintaining the suspense of the chase.

The author set herself a difficult task by tangling the strands of the story so they turn back on themselves. For the most part, she is able to carry it off, but sometimes the banter of the two modern characters, Dan and Kirby, seems forced. The premise of the work is imaginative and well-executed, making the improbable and somewhat unsatisfying ending forgivable.

'The Shining Girls' is published by Umuzi, Exclusive Books, R185