The Shining Girls was not quite what I expected it to be. At some point between me adding it to my To Read list and me actually reading it, I had gotten it in my brain that the aforementioned "shining girls" had superpowers and were being trained by scientists. In actuality, the shining girls are a group of women and/or girls of different ethnicities and walks of life all across different periods of time in the city of Chicago, all of whom share one thing in common: a man named Harper is traveling throughout time to kill them. 
 Not sure how that mix up happened. Thankfully, besides enjoying stories about strange mutant super girls, I also really love stories about serial killers. And time travel. 
 As mentioned, The Shining Girls is about a serial killer named Harper who, through a strange series of events, stumbles across this house which allows him to move backwards and forwards in time when he exits it. Inside the house there is a room that his past? future? It gets messy when time travel is involved, just go with it... has set up with a list of girls names and objects associated with him. These are the aforementioned "shining girls" named such because according to Harper and his craziness, he can sense them through time and see them "shine." Moving forward and backwards in their lives he meets them as children and kills them as adults, leaving a small object at the murder scene taken from one of the other girls. 
 Our other main character is one of the girls named Kirby. She is from the 1900s and survived Harper's attack. In "present" day (1993 is the farthest forward we ever go) she joins up with the Chicago Sun-Times and tries to investigate her own attack with an older reporter named Dan who originally covered her attack. 
 Speckled throughout both Kirby and Harper's POVs are chapters from the points of view of other girls. Through these chapters we see bits and pieces of their lives and see the city of Chicago change over the course of the different times. These were some of my favorite parts of the book. The time periods that the different girls live in range from pre WWII to in the midst of McCarthy's Red Scare to the early 90s. It's fascinating to see the difference in race relations, gender politics, or even the rise of technology all through these different girl's perspectives. We learn about their hopes and dreams and fears, all the while seeing signs of Harper hunting them, unable to do anything to protect them from their bloody ends. It was a bit depressing being so helpless but each and every girl was completely and utterly fleshed out, I couldn't help but keep reading. 
 The set up is really interesting but I felt that a lot of the payoff was lackluster. As you would expect in a book with both time travel and serial killers, there are a lot of questions raised about motivations of Harper and explanations for why and how things are happening. Unfortunately, I felt that most of these questions aren't really answered, or at least not answered well. How can Harper see the girls "shining?" Is the house causing his madness or is he just insane? Why does the house seemingly call to Harper? Is he the only one who can use it? I kept waiting for some more in depth answers and never really got them. 
 The ending felt very rushed to me and as such left me confused. The latter might just be due to my brain's comprehension abilities when it comes to time travel, but certain plot points just don't make sense to me. (view spoiler)[I really wanted someone besides me, the outside reader, to fully understand Harper's murders. That the girls whose lives I got glimpses into would have some sense of justice, only if that means that SOMEONE know the truth about their killings. But we never get that. We discover Harper's time traveling abilities, but there is no real "aha!" moment that I was wanting. (hide spoiler)] It wasn't necessarily a dissatisfying ending, but it didn't effectively tie up the threads spanning across decades of murders, in my opinion. 
 All in all I did greatly enjoy reading this book. The journey throughout the beginning and middle is extremely compelling and the premise is very original. I loved all of the backstory chapters into the other girls lives and wanted see where this all led. But unfortunately for all its build up the ending is just... ordinary. If this was a regular murder mystery about a serial killer the ending would have sufficed just fine. But Harper can travel through time! He's killed a dozen or so girls spanning across decades leaving impossible objects at the crime scene! The book deserved a better resolution befitting the complexity of the plot.