"The Shining Girls," a Novel by Lauren Beukes The year is 1974. A precocious little girl is playing outdoors with a toy circus she's built when a spooky gent with a limp approaches her. She shows him the bumblebee that, in her imagination, is a lion. He pulls its wings off. He would hurt her too, but little girls bore him. "I'll see you when you're all grown-up," he promises. Look out for me, O.K., sweetheart? I'll come back for you. Thirteen years later he does. Thus begins "The Shining Girls," Lauren Beukes's strong contender for the role of this summer's universal beach read. Ms. Beukes is a South African whose earlier works have been closer to hard-core science fiction, but "The Shining Girls" is pure thriller. The Irish writer Tana French, no slouch at transfixing and scaring readers, may have spoken for us all when she said of this expert hair-raiser: "It creeped the holy bejasus out of me." The little girl from 1974 turns out to be this novel's indefatigable heroine, Kirby Mazrachi. And the biggest part of her story unfolds in 1992, when she wangles her way into an internship at The Chicago Sun-Times. Ms. Beukes, who has done an unusual amount of research, captures the inky, curmudgeonly spirit of a newsroom perfectly. And she gives Kirby a fine foil: the crusty Dan Velasquez, a former crime reporter who has now downshifted to the less grueling baseball beat. He hardly wants Kirby as an assistant, but she guilts him into it. Dan wrote about a vicious 1989 attack on Kirby but never bothered to follow up. Until she appears at his office, wearing a scarf to hide her neck scars, he doesn't know that she didn't die. "There are only so many plots in the world," Kirby says about storytelling. It's how they unfold that makes them interesting. That's the key to success for "The Shining Girls," which would resemble a standard serial-killer story had Ms. Beukes not loaded it with acrobatic twists. This book's serial killer is a time traveler who leaves a souvenir with each victim. This makes his trail of breadcrumbs elusive, to say the least. What can be made of a Jackie Robinson baseball card that turns up on a victim in 1943, four years before Robinson played in the major leagues? We know the killer's name, Harper Curtis, and his tactics long before we figure out what he is doing. This book's glaring weakness is Ms. Beukes's cursory treatment of who Harper is; she barely explains why he limps. She also dumps all of the story's occult power on a boarded-up dwelling known as the House: beware of an uppercase letter that is used for unexplained aggrandizement. The House has a mind of its own, but we never find out how it works. All we know is that when Harper looks out a window he sees a speeding tableau of the kind that will deliver swell special effects in a movie adaptation some day. This kind of chronology is several kinds of trippy: "A hopscotch grid appears, disappears in the sleeting rain, moves elsewhere, snaking across the cement. A couch rots through seasons and then catches fire. When Harper leaves the House there's no telling where it will send him. The House is a shrine to murdered women, even though Harper does not recognize their names and has not killed some of them yet. He is drawn to them by a) the House's foreshadowing, and b) the "shine" of the title. Each victim is especially accomplished or interesting or otherwise sympathetic. And snuffing out her glow is what thrills Harper. Beyond that, he is a nobody, though a very nasty and frightening one. Kirby survives his attempt to stab and disembowel her only because his knife gets stuck in her dog. Once Ms. Beukes gets her chronological tricks working at full blast, Harper's methods become maddeningly effective. The police pick him up for the 1954 killing of an architect. He first spotted this victim two decades earlier, noticing she had a gift for drawing. But they can't nail him. "There is not a spot of blood on him and no sign of the murder weapon," and that's because "it is buried in the neck of a dead dog 35 years from now." Ms. Beukes can be faulted for not revealing or even caring how this works. But to her credit, she's got a gift for killer dialogue. Like: "Tell me the future. Don't make me read it in your entrails. A big asset to "The Shining Girls" is the emotional effect of the victims" unusual virtue. For instance, there is Zora, who works as a welder in 1943. In one of what Ms. Beukes calls in the acknowledgments her "intentional nudges in the service of the story," Zora is a black employee of the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company and she's strong enough for shipbuilding. She has four children, lost her husband in the war, and is tough enough to break Harper's jaw. But she is no match for his viciousness. And her succumbing to him is one of the book's many gasp-worthy moments. Eventually, "The Shining Girls" shifts into chaotic, anything-goes mode. One fight starts in 1993, rolls into 1929 and then returns to 1993. Kirby develops sufficiently amazing powers of detection to figure out what Harper has been doing, and this leaves no surprise for the final chapters. Despite the complexity of all the book's characters and time periods, there's only one possible outcome for a Kirby-Harper showdown. "They make it sexy in the movies," one murder victim's relative complains to Kirby. But Ms. Beukes emphatically does not make femicide (as the book calls it) sexy, and perhaps that's why she leaves Harper as such a cipher. We neither get nor want to read his mind; it's Kirby's gumption and bravery that matter. She was a special kid, but she wasn't necessarily bound for glory. It took a monstrous villain to turn her into a heroine.