Zoo City

First, listen to the soundtrack. A lot of this book takes place around the South African music scene, which I didn't have any context for imagining until listening to the soundtrack.

Zinzi December is "animaled". She did something so bad that now the only thing keeping her from "Hell's Undertow" is her sloth companion. When she's hired to find a missing pop star, things start to fall apart and things spiral way out of control.

Reading this book was like watching someone do a digital painting: It never goes in the order that I would think it would from looking at the final product. Likewise Beukes is filling in details all along that BAM suddenly become a paining at the end. For a while it drove me nuts because it seemed like the plot had resolved, but I am glad I pushed through it.