The cop in question is Bobby Zha, a San Francisco police officer working the Chinatown beat some time in the near future. Bobby's career and his family life are in shambles, so it is with something like relief that he finds himself gunned down in an abandoned warehouse while chasing a lead in a mysterious shooting. But when Bobby wakes up -- the same, but different, and thousands of miles from where he was shot -- he realizes that death hasn't resolved the mysteries of his life. Who killed him? Why? And how is his own death related to the crime he was investigating?
The basic premise behind 9Tail Fox is interesting, and Grimwood does a good job balancing Bobby's confusion (including some tastefully played existential angst) with his refreshingly practical use of his new life. Grimwood also excels at conveying his bleak vision of San Francisco, where the fog barely covers the stench of corruption, moral and otherwise.
The mystery at the heart of 9Tail Fox, however, is terrible, both sloppy and uninteresting. Grimwood reveals his hand too early, blowing the mystery's cover in an obviously out-of-place interlude about a Russian scientist that takes place only a few chapters into the book. Grimwood then takes forever to wind up the story's various open threads. I got the sense that Grimwood had thought of the mystery and its macabre resolution first, and then jury-rigged the rest of the story around it. That may explain why Bobby's investigation seems unfocused and haphazard; even when he does make progress, his goals are so obscure, and his methods so puzzling, that it's difficult to figure out what he is uncovering.
Bobby does eventually figure everything out. But it's a confusing and exasperating crawl to a foreordained conclusion.
Copyright © 2009 Steven Wu 