(2.5 Stars)

This book started off really slow... I was about 50% into it before I started getting into the story. By the end, it was good (not great), but so far out of the three books I've read by this author, this one was the best. ( )

I listened to this book on an 11 hour drive and it was so helpful! the audiobook has several narrators which helped switch it up and made it easier to keep everyone straight. A great weave of a story, included modern elements of crime solving like Facebook but not in a cheesy unbelievable way. Really enjoyed this "case", ( )

Okay people who like to be creeped out. Time to immediately get this book and start reading. This is a dark and creepy police procedural. It's told from several POVs with distinct personalities. It constantly flirts with the supernatural leaving us readers always wondering exactly what it going on. It reads like a mash up of True Detective and The X-Files.

It is beautifully written and uses the urban decay of Detroit as a brilliant setting. I found myself completely unable to put the book down for the last two hundred pages. This is easily my favorite book of the year. Now I am going to try and not have creepy nightmares. ( )

I had a hard time with this book early on, and the element that made me take a break for a while is still the element that bothered me the most--that although we have a ton of very distinct characters, they all mostly speak/think with the same style/voice. So although we're in close third POV for the whole book, it feels as if all of the characters are thinking/talking in the same style and with the same distinct mannerisms/voice, which was a constant distraction for me early on. The other character issue that led me to put the book down and take a long break was the fact that the character who I found most engaging early on, and was most interested in, got so little page time. That's always a danger with multi-POV books that don't give each character equal time, and in this particular case, I was one of those readers put off by it and left less interested as a result.

That said, the middle of the book read fast for me once I came back to it and worked to ignore the similarity of the characters' voices. The problem is, most of my reading inertia came simply because it was easy to keep reading, and when it came to finishing the book, I was finishing to finish.

The simple truth is, this book is incredibly cluttered. There are tons of interesting moments and threads and ideas and characters, but Beukes packed so much into this book, and split the narrative focus in so many directions, that the book didn't pack as much power as some of the ideas certainly warranted. The gore of the bodies was fantastic, as was some of Beukes writing, but so many threads were left unconnected (some of them important), with certain turns coming out of the blue and some of the plot threads (that took up a lot of time) being fairly unimportant in the end... well, I'm afraid I'm not inclined either to recommend the book or to try another work by Beukes.

This was interesting, but ultimately too cluttered to feel finished or fully worth the time. ( )

This book is exceptionally entertaining reading, but I had so many questions in the end. It takes place in Detroit, and empty factories are some of the settings. I loved the block art party. This author has some fertile imagination! But...How did that "monster" guy get everybody to mass hallucinate around him? For example when he went to that pottery place, how did he get the owner to see all these flowers sprouting all over the place? In the end, how did he get the DJ girlfriend to hallucinate that her chest was opening? How did he get the chairs to obey him?
IN this book there are chair gods, mobile phone gods... kind of reminds me of American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.
I'm reading Dan Simmons book "the terror" right now, and it's strange that there's two corpses made into one in that book, and in this one too.
I like the addressing of teenage boys bullying and sexually harassing girls. What I didn't like was the parts that were epistolary-like, showing reviews of the you-tube boy's videos, and the comments from posted videos of when the detective's daughter Layla beat one her best-friend's sexual predators. ( )