Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (2010)

Angry Robot / Amazon / Author’s Site

4/5 stars

Description:
Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty online 419 scam habit – and a talent for finding lost things. But when her latest client, a little old lady, turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job: missing persons.

Review:
Zoo City is an urban fantasy set in South Africa. Just when you thought that everything’s been done with animal familiars, Beukes adds an interesting social dimension to it. After a rapture-like event, people who have committed major crimes (dubbed as zoos) began to appear with animal familiars.

The truth is we’re all criminals. Murderers, rapists, junkies. Scum of the earth. In China they execute zoos on principle. Because nothing says guilty like a spirit critter at your side.

Zinzi is a former journalist turned 419 scammer and lost-stuff-finder to pay off her old drug debts. Her magical ability is finding lost things, but after the death of her client, she ends up uncovering the dark histories of characters in the music biz, while trying to figure out a pattern to the unexplainable zoo serial murders.

Urban fantasy and crime noir often bond over the same whisky bottle, drinking it out of a paper bag while hanging out at an abandoned train station, and you can’t get grittier than Zinzi in the zoo slums. The world-building is creative and the setting feels authentic. Beukes throws in details like how a traditional psychic in the healer market sports a top with a D&G logo (so subtle that it could be the real thing) and waggles a brand new iPhone. And the prose is as hardboiled as it can get: “The tea tasted like stale horse piss drained through a homeless guy’s sock, but I drank it anyway.” I’m a sucker for both noir and original fantasy settings, and Zoo City excels on both fronts. This book is worth reading for the world-building alone.

The magic system is unique with enough context to make it believable, but also enough mystery to give it that chilling edge of the supernatural: “All it takes is one Afghan warlord to show up with a Penguin in a bulletproof vest, and everything science and religion thought they knew goes right out the window.” And zoos are pretty creepy to other people, because they are former (or current) criminals and there is no rigorous way of documenting their magical abilities. In fact, many zoos hide their real abilities from the government if it could get them into trouble.

While this book has a lot of strengths, its weakness lies in the plot and pacing. The plot is interesting, but it’s not a page-turner and the pace is actually quite slow. There’s a lot of funny moments and slices-of-life sections that flesh out the very intriguing protagonist, but there isn’t much progress on the main investigation until the last 20% of the book. I loved the plot twists and the surprises, but it all happens suddenly towards the end.

Zoo City isn’t the most riveting crime thriller, but its highly recommended for the innovative world-building.

You might like this if you like…
Urban fantasy + South Africa + crime noir; the grittiest setting ever; animal familiars; bits of journalistic pieces (including hilarious tabloid journalism) interspersed throughout the text, breaking up the hardboiled prose; one of the most unique fantasy novels of the 21st century

I received this book for free from Angry Robot Books because I did a nice thing and donated to the World SF Travel Fund. I don’t think Angry Robot cares that I wrote a book review, since it has already won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award. But dear readers, now you know why this book in its various forms gets plugged everywhere, because it is a darn good read.