Broken Monsters
Shirley Jackson Award nominee 2014.
In the city that’s become a symbol for the death of the American dream, a nightmare killer is unravelling reality. A terrifying new thriller from Lauren Beukes, award-winning author of The Shining Girls.
Detective Gabriella Versado is used to dealing with ugly murders. This is Detroit, after all. But the corpses turning up in abandoned buildings are unlike any she’s seen before: queasy mash-ups of animals and humans, like some DIY taxidermied freak show.
After her teen daughter Layla finds photographs of the bodies on her computer and leaks them to a blogger friend and thus the whole of the Internet, Gabi finds herself fighting to stay on the case she’s compromised – and to save her relationship with her daughter.
But as the murders seize the imagination of the populace with copycat killings and disturbing ‘art installations’ appearing overnight, Detective Versado has to hunt down and confront a killer who has let loose the seething subconscious of the city.
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Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes is a journalist who has contributed to The Big Issue, Colors, The Hollywood Reporter, Marie Claire, Nature Medicine, and The Sunday Times. She is the head writer for the TV cartoon Clockwork Zoo Animation, the cocreator of the show URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, and the author of Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past, which was nominated for the Sunday Times Alan Paton nonfiction award.
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Reviews and Comments
There were parts I genuinely liked among all the things that were only so-so. Lauren Beukes is like a butterfly in this book, flitting from one subject to the next, trying to cover all the flowers in the field, and never really completely emptying one of nectar. In her wake is a host of flowers half-drained and unsatisfied. Oh, and for all that research she did, she really should have known a Smith&Wesson uses a magazine, not a clip :P