I was going to fire up the time-mower to do this review, but I was scared I'd bump into a homicidal maniac so I left it in the garage this time. 
 Harper Curtis is a hobo during the Great Depression in Chicago who makes a miraculous discovery when he gains access to a mysterious house that can transport him into the future up until the early '90s. Unfortunately, Harper is a psychopath who starts using names and objects in the house to track and murder women in various times. Harper thinks that the house is leading him to girls who 'shine' and that killing them will complete some grand design. 
 Harper engages in a ritual of meeting a girl as a child, then using the house to go to a time when they're adults and murder them. He tries this game on Kirby Mazrachi and severely injures her, but she miraculously manages to survive his attack. In 1993, Kirby is a college student who is obsessed with tracking down the man who nearly killed her, and she gets an internship at a newspaper to research similar cases. She convinces a former crime reporter turned sports writer named Dan Velasquez to help with her investigation although he thinks there is little chance of turning anything useful up. 
 This has got an intriguing premise even if it isn't the first time traveling serial killer story I've heard. Beukes has a distinctive writing style that I generally liked, and Kirby was a strong protagonist although I had a hard time believing that any of her bosses at the newspaper would take the kind of crap she regularly dished out from an intern. Still, I didn't particularly enjoy this book, and that was mainly because of Harper Curtis. 
 Harper is certainly crazy and evil enough to make a good villain. His attacks on the women are described in graphic detail and his murder attempt on Kirby was particularly brutal and disturbing. But that's all there is to him. He's just a crazy guy with a knife who hates women and nothing else. Any history we get is just meant to reinforce that like a story about him torturing farm animals as a kid. Being able to travel through time makes him scarier, but other than that, he's no different than any other serial killer that we seen a thousand times in fiction. 
 Part of this may be some bad timing on my part. I've been watching the Hannibal TV series as well as rereading some of the early John Sandford Prey novels which featured plenty of murdering whackos so I think I've got a case of serial killer burnout. Whether that influenced me or not, I found Harper's brand of crazy just tiresome after a while since it was all about getting off on making innocent woman suffer. 
 Maybe if there had been (view spoiler)[some type of motive for Harper to be killing people all over time, I could have gotten more into it. However, once it was revealed that he was really just closing time loops he had created rather than being guided by some force related to the house, I lost interest in him completely. (hide spoiler)] 
 As Trudi pointed out in her review , Kirby's investigation doesn't really accomplish much either. (view spoiler)[ The climatic moments come from coincidence and happenstance, not because of any brilliant deductions. That doesn't make for much of a satisfying pay-off when the book spends so much time detailing how consumed Kirby is with digging through old files and tracking down similar cases. (hide spoiler)] 
 It's an interesting blend of crime and sci-fi, but I wish it'd been a little more intriguing on the sci-fi side and had a little less of the typical fictional serial killer on the crime side.