9Tail Fox

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned: it has been four whole days since my last book review. I must be slipping. In an attempt to make up for this, here's a short write-up of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9Tail Fox.

Bobby Zha is SFPD, good dealing with the homeless, kids and animals, but almost completely unable to relate to anyone else, talents are perfectly suited to his current case. A burglar has been shot after breaking in to the house of a blind octogenarian Russian professor and Bobby has been brought in to interview the only suspect: the professor's niece. After concluding that the girl couldn't possibly have shot the burglar, Bobby casually moves on to investigate a warehouse close to his childhood home in Chinatown and manages to get himself shot. Fatally.

Thus, Bobby is somewhat surprised when he wakes to find himself in a long term care facility in New York, where everyone insists that his name is Robert Vanberg. Using Vanberg's substantial trust fund — another result of the car accident that left Vanberg's body in a coma for 20 years — Bobby heads back to San Francisco and reinvents himself as government spook so that he can solve the riddle of his own murder and, incidentally, attend his own funeral.

After a couple of tip offs from a vagrant called Colonel Billy, Bobby hooks up with SFPD officer Flic Valdez and starts investigating. Unfortunately for him, the first thing he discovers is that everyone disliked Sergeant Zha, that they thought that his behaviour was appalling and that no was particularly surprised that his corpse was found next to a couple of bags of crystal meth. As he gradually turns up more information on his murder, Bobby starts to realise that the whole thing is far, far bigger than he first thought, that he's managed to fall in love with Flic whilst simultaneously grossly offending and isolating her, and that everything ties back into the original burglary.

So, to a few parting thoughts. Grimwood is something of a past master of the near future dective story, as comprehensively proved by the Arabesk novels, so the impressively clever plot can be left almost unmentioned. Almost, but not quite, since the novel is dedicated to Bulgakov — the man who gave JCG his initial love of complicated plots — a crack addicted cat and a professor called Persikov.

What I really liked about the book was the characterisation of Zha and the way he seemed to grow as person. The way that his initial actions, as he drifted through his unhappy, rather directionless life, trapped in his marriage and unable to talk to his daughter, appeared completely normal and blameless, at least from his own point of view. Then, after returning as Robert Vanberg and getting a chance to view his actions from the outside, he started to realise what an appalling person he'd really been, which seemed to change the way he behaved towards Flic whom he initially treated quite lightly and quite badly, but whom he eventually realised he loved.