Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when 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.
Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.
Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own. From Goodreads.

I like the idea of people getting a familiar, an animal companion, when they commit a crime. This is a very interesting read and it takes several twists that I didn't expect which I really like. What I didn't like is that the book is full of foreign words that even though they make sense in a sentence just make the whole read more difficult. Words such as: nyangas, sangomas and muti. This distracted me from enjoying the book as much as would have liked.

This book qualifies for:
100 books in a year Reading Challenge 2012, 
Goodreads 2012 Reading Challenge,
A-Z  Book Challenge 2012,
2012 Sci-Fi Challenge,
2012 Ebook Challenge,
Thankfully Reading Weekend 2012