There are empty houses with ugly pasts. People may have lived there, moved around every room, and dropped plates in the kitchen while drying them with tattered dish towels. There may have been love in one room, quiet whispers that never reached the air. There may have been violence in other corners, fists blasting holes into plaster walls, droplets of blood on the door frame, signs of a failed escape.
And then there are houses that are alive and have their own agendas.
In Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls, a bad man walks into a run-down vacant house in 1931 and walks out of the same run down vacant house into different years. Harper Curtis is a collector of human lives and a destroyer of bright futures. He is fleeing from hoodlums in a 1931 Chicago shanty town, homes made out of found wood and tar paper. He finds a key and pockets it. A key means possibility. A key is a means of escape. While walking the streets of Chicago he begins to hear music and a voice inside his head urging him this way and that way. He finds the house, almost like it was waiting for him. This is where he discovers his opportunity to take lives.
He seeks out women at different times in their lives. He approaches them when they’re 5 or 6, gives them a trinket and comes back twenty years later to kill them. As his calling card, he leaves seemingly random items. On one body, a 28-year-old widow on her way home from a 9 hour shift of welding, Harper leaves a baseball card with Jackie Robinson on it. He visits a young architect sketching at a café table. He takes her fancy black art deco cigarette lighter and years later when he sees her again, he shows her the lighter and she immediately knows who he is.
Harper visits Kirby Mazrachi in 1974 when she’s 7. He gives her an orange toy pony and says he’ll see her later. But 22-year-old Kirby Mazrachi is different. She was supposed to die like the other bright and shining women with so much potential burning in them. Her throat was cut and she was nearly disemboweled like the other women but she survived. She begins to search for her killer.
Kirby interns at a newspaper and is assigned to Dan Velasquez, a sports reporter. He used to cover homicides but burned out after following so many grisly deaths. He doesn’t want to be a nanny for some college kid. She says she chose him because he “covered my murder.” He grudgingly helps her find old articles about similar murders. He sees her getting more and more obsessed and tries to tell her to slow it down; especially when she riles the police by talking to the mother of a girl who was a victim. Kirby knows the murders are connected and they have something to do with her.
Harper continues to go in and out of time. He enters the house in 1931 and leaves it in 1950 or 1993 or 1987. He kills for no real reason other than the fact that he sees the light in the girls he’s chosen, their future potential. He wants to snuff out those dreams and ambitions. He takes away mementos from each one, pinning them up on the wall of the house. A bracelet. A baseball card. A dirty tennis ball.
Kirby is beginning to put the pieces together and is getting closer to finding out who tried to kill her. While going through an old box of toys she notices the little orange pony. She remembers it’s from him. She looks at the bottom of the toy. It was made in 1982. He gave it to Kirby in 1974.
Kirby and Dan, the only one to believe that the killer is from a different time, chase after Harper and what happens next….well, I can’t tell you. I picked this book up on Monday and finished it two days later. If I had less morals (they’re already pretty lax as it is) I would have called in sick and spent the day reading it. That’s how good it is. Now I’m trying to pass it along to a friend who is going on vacation. It’s a great book to spend reading for hours at an airport waiting for your connecting flight. Or holed up in your bed with a blanket wrapped around you and three lamps on.
Be sure to visit A Reading Life for more reviews and news of all things happening at the Everett Public Library.
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