Broken Monsters

A criminal mastermind creates violent tableaus in abandoned Detroit warehouses in Lauren Beukes’s genre-bending novel of suspense.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit’s standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?

If you’re Detective Versado’s geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you’re desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you’re Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you’ll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe -- and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.

If Lauren Beukes’s internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

Scary as hell and hypnotic. I couldn’t put it down...I’d grab it if I were you. -- Stephen King

Lauren Beukes writes novels, comics and screeplays. She’s the author of the critically-acclaimed international bestseller Broken Monsters; The Shining Girls, about a time traveling serial killer; Zoo City, a phantasmagorical Joburg noir and winner of the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award; and the neo-political thriller Moxyland. She worked as a journalist and as show runner on one of the South Africa’s biggest animated TV shows, directed an award-winning documentary, and wrote the New York Times bestselling graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa.