Book review: Broken Monsters

Title: Broken Monsters
Author: Lauren Beukes
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Picture courtesy Amazon

Summary: There's a serial killer on the loose in Detroit.  He's using the bodies as artwork.  Detective Gabriella Versado is on the case.  She thought she'd seen it all, but these bodies are gruesome. Gabriella's 15-year-old daughter Layla is just trying to fit in at her new school.  Jonno is desperately trying to revive his freelance journalism career.  TK is trying to protect his homeless family.

Review:  I started listening to this book on CD.  This is NOT a good book to listen to in audio format (at least it wasn't for me).  While the story is creepy (in a good way, at least at first), I didn't like the character's voices and there were too many characters to keep track of.  I can always sense when I'm not engaged with a book on CD when I space out while listening and realize I have no idea what's going on in the book.

When I realized the audio version wasn't working, I checked out the actual book.  Ah, that's better. One thing I liked about this book is that the protaganists weren't particularly likeable.  Jonno is trying to exploit this case to further his own career.  Layla's primary "fault" is she's 15 and dealing with her parents' divorce and all of the other insecurities that come with being 15.  TK is a peripheral character at best but he has his own violent history.  Gabriella is a detective and dealing with all of the bureaucracy and other crap that goes along with that, plus less than stellar co-workers.

Where this book lost me is what happened once they discovered who the serial killer was.  The search for the serial killer dragged on for a bit and the climatic scene where Gabriella and the rest of the characters converge on the killer's final piece of artwork was a little too supernatural for my taste.   I'm not really into demons that take over somebody's body, but that's just me.  If you're into that stuff, you might like this book better than I did.