9Tail Fox

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Bobby Zha is a Sergeant in the San Francisco Police Department. His years on the force have made him numb to the world, and the people around him, including his wife and daughter.

His sudden and unexplained murder leaves his family reeling, and the SFPD bewildered. But nobody is more bewildered then Sergeant Zha, when a nine-tailed celestial fox comes to him at the moment of his death, and tells him he has one chance to put things right.

Now he’s trying to solve his own murder; trying to understand why he has been resurrected in another man’s body; and trying to repair the shattered pieces of his family’s life. But his time seems to be running out...

From the shell-shattered ruins of Stalingrad in 1942 to the present-day politics of San Francisco's Chinatown, 9Tail Fox is evocative of place and crystal-clear in its depiction of character.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Thriller, Urban Fantasy

280 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2005

About the author

'Tough, sexy and brutal, but leavened with sharp humour... Grimwood is a name to watch.' The Times

Jon Courtenay Grimwood was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Apart from novels he writes for magazines and newspapers. He travels extensively and undertakes a certain amount of consulting. Until recently he wrote a monthly review column for the Guardian.

Felaheen, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did his last book, End of the World Blues, about a British sniper on the run from Iraq and running an Irish bar in Tokyo. He has just delivered the Fallen Blade, the first of three novels set in an alternate 15th-century Venice

His work is published in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish and American, among others

He is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, currently editor-in-chief of Red magazine. They divide their time between London and Winchester...

Reviews

[Rajish Maharaj · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF
I found,it slow, boring and quite frnakly uninteresting. Zha seems to be a womanizer and over half the book and he barely even scratch the surface of,who murdered him. He,hasnt,even questioned sanchez. Its premise seemd gopd,but the execution is lacking in intensity to keep u wanting more.

[Bill Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary! This book has been on my TBR pile for a long, long time. Jon isn't that prolific, at least writing SF, and I was savoring the anticipation. It was worth the wait. Great characters, sly but simple prose, and a nice twisty mystery. I need to start reading some of the crime fiction that he writes as Jack Grimwood. This too is crime fiction, terrific crime fiction, but with a clear supernatural(?) plot device. Is it supernatural? That would be telling. I could have finished it last night, but I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want it to be over, so I finished this evening. I don't want it to be over.

[Ashleigh Motbey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't say I enjoyed this very much at all. I know they say that it's good for characters to have flaws, but I felt Bobby was full of flaws that made him completely unlikable. The only quality he had was that he loved his daughter.

I found this very hard to get through and although quite an interesting plot line, I didn't think it was written all that well. It was hard to follow with all the POV changes and I didn't find any of the characters all that likable.

So much more could have been done with this.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detective investigates his own murder in near-future San Francisco. Been a while since I read any JCG, and I really enjoyed this.

[Lasairfiona · Rating 1 out of 5]

I want so much to like this book. The idea of a dead man waking up in another body to try and solve his own murder intrigues me but it took some serious masochism to finish the book. It could go the mythical route (a 9 tailed celestial fox shows the chinese mythos) or even an almost sci fi route (surgery?) to keep my interest. Unfortunately, this book goes nowhere. The main character, Zha, has the makings of a well rounded little sh*t whose flaws outweigh his plusses who just might try to make it right but the author can't keep the character in mind. Zha is all over the place. He starts out as a misunderstood cop who has an empathy with the street people and ends up nowhere. The flaws, including womanizing and a forgetfulness when it comes to family, seem like additions instead of the integral pieces they should have been. The author must have intended for these flaws to make Zha a great character but Zha wanders through the book, seemingly lost and leaves the reader even more confused than Zha seems to be.

That doesn't even address the difficulty I had reading the story. It reads like the editor likes to read things by highlighting lines and accidently deleted a ton of the material in the process. In addition, the author seemed to have a clear beginning and a clear end with no clue what to do in the middle. The chapters occasionally switch to another character but it doesn't happen often enough for it to make sense (why am I reading about Russia during WWII when the character had barely been mentioned?). Some chapters have to be labeled flashback. There is _no_ flow in this book.

Could someone rewrite this? The character Zha deserves a deft hand. Zha could stand out in a story that was only okay and even more so in a murder mystery with 9 tailed foxes.

[Chadwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of disposeable, read-it-in-a-day supernatural detective techno thriller.

In a near-future San Francisco, Detective Sergeant Bobby Zha is killed investigating a break-in in Chinatown. He awakes in the body of a white man who's been in a coma ward in NYC for 20 years. Luckily, the body he's wearing is the heir to a sizable settlement over the car crash that left it comatose, so Bobby zips back to SF to investigate his death. Police corruption and brain-swapping technothriller hijinks ensue.

Grimwood gets a lot of the feel of San Francisco right, although one feels that he didn't really leave Chinatown/Union Square on his research visits. The rest of the city is sketched in very ghostly details. A Latina character lives with her mom and brother in a hose on Valencia. There are like three actual houses on Valencia, I think. And I don't know any locals who spend that much time at Cafe De La Presse, or who would stay at the goddamned Hotel Triton, as Zha does. Grimwood did spend some worthwhile time getting to know Chinatown (except I don't know where there's room between Grant and Stockton for a warehouse on a side alley, which is where Zha is killed).

One minor gripe: editing. A character is described on one page as having studied criminology in Houston, and then on the very next page as having attended university in Austin. A chapter or so later, we find that, yes it was an MA and a PhD in Austin. Another character, Colonel Billy is wearing combat boots on one page. On the next page, the rain is running into his cracked tennis shoes. Really John, these things stick out.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/589074.html[return][return]I very much enjoyed Grimwood's Ashraf Bey trilogy, though was a little less convinced by either his earlier redRobe or his more recent Stamping Butterflies. I'm glad to report (IMHO) a return to form. Like the Ashraf Bey trilogy this is essentially a police procedural in a somewhat alternative history version of a famous port city with distint sfnal overtones to do with technological brain enhancements. (So we have identified what he does well, then.)[return][return]This time the city is San Francisco, however, and the central character is killed on page 30 - only to wake up, like Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber, in a hospital in upstate New York; and he spends the rest of the book solving his own murder. The basic plot has of course been done before, but I love Grimwood's intense and often sultry writing style; and here he successfully transfers it to a new setting, with memorable characters.[return][return]I still had a very slight feeling, after we found the solution to the mystery, that it might not hang together all that well if I inspected it too closely, but the ride was such good fun that I won't look. [return][return]A final point - I can't help noting that this is the second book by JCG featuring a scene with teenagers meeting for the first time in business class on a long-distance flight and spending the journey making out. There is presumably a true story there, waiting to be retold.

[Isabel (kittiwake) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fox was pure white and carried its tail high and curled like flame over its back. Its eyes were red as coals, fierce with anger. White canines showed on either side of its mouth.
'Jinwei hu,' said Bobby.
The fox nodded, even though Bobby had only said the name in his head. Somewhere on Grant Avenue a kid let off a string of firecrackers left over from the night before and the fox grinned.

Although both books have a police detective as a main character, "9tail Fox" is completely different from the only other book of this author's that I've read. "Lucifer's Dragon" is cyberpunk, while "9tail Fox" is more of a noir detective story and is set closer to the present day. That's a good thing, as I hate finding a new author only to discover that s/he writes the same book over and over again.

Bobby Zha is a policeman of Chinese descent who works for the SFPD in Chinatown. His career has stalled and his marriage is in tatters, but he has an affinity for children and street people, and his boss Lieutenant Que mostly leaves him to his own devices. After being shot while on duty he sees a nine-tailed white celestial fox as he is dying, and then wakes up in the body of a man who has been in a coma since he was a seven years old. Conveniently, Robert Vanberg had received a multi-million dollar settlement for his injuries, which means that Bobby has the resources to investigate the cases he was working on at the time of his murder, in an attempt to find out why he died and why he didn't.

[Unwisely · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adored the Arabesk series (start with Pashazade!), so when I was wandering through the SF section and saw this novel, I grabbed it.

(I had forgotten he wrote another book I didn't like as much, I only noticed when I looked for the name of that book just now. Hunh.)

Anyway. This was wonderful - sort of a supernatural detective story, set in alternate San Francisco. (About which I know very little, so if there were geographical problems, I would never have known.) Has the sort of frenetic feel of the good Neal Stephenson novels but manages to finish the story without feeling like you just drove off a cliff. (Dude, I love Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, but I am aware of their flaws.) OK, he mostly resolved things. I'm still not clear what Pete Sanchez was doing - or why - or why Bea's family didn't stop that relationship...but that's acceptable.

An anti-hero I liked, whoa.

[Brendan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool idea, but kind of a mess in the execution. Dead cop must solve his own murder. It's kind of noir-ish, which I enjoy, but the plot is convoluted even by noir detective standards, and, in the end, I didn't feel like it all made much sense. Annoyance: our main character is supposed to be kind of a jerk, but he's always having sex and then making sure to tell us that he "smells her on his fingers." Not sure what the author was aiming at here, but it comes across as frat boyish. Major distraction: though the characters are American, the British author doesn't have them speak American English. So people are always saying "meant to" when an American would say "supposed to," people take "lifts," and when asked if he had any trouble, our hero answers, "should I have done?" Maybe the author just didn't expect a US sale, but this is something the US publisher should have fixed. It took me out of the story every time it came up, which was every couple of pages.

[Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book vastly- however, I enjoyed it for reasons that may not have an appeal for everybody else under the sun.
#1: I find Chinese religion and cosmology a fascinating thing to poke around at.
#2: I live in the city where it is set, and know the area of town that it takes place in quite well.
#3: I have a great weakness for foxes.

These three things- which I found the book to be full of (and well-written about)- are things which wouldn't necessarily appeal to anyone else. As a result, I am giving it 4 stars: I suspect someone without these same interests wouldn't have as much enjoyment of it as I had.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the pace and POV of this book. I will definitely read more of this author.

The sci-fi elements of this book were almost too subtle to call it sci-fi; it also carried elements of what I would typically call fantasy. Yet combined as they were, it was a very satisfying, interesting story. I appreciate the ease with which Jon Grimwood crosses the boundaries of the genres; nothing awkward there.

I am going to with-hold my judgements of gender-based stereo-types for this first book I've read; there were many different women depicted many different ways, and I'm as-yet unsure what the pattern says.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a police procedural with a sf/fantasy premise -- San Francisco Sargeant Bobby Zha is killed yet returns as another man to solve the crime. I couldn't follow the story very well and I knew that there were major holes in it. On the other hand, I raced through the novel to see what happened to several sympathetic characters -- Bobby Zha, his daughter Kris, and Officer Felicidad Valdez. Grimwood's writing is stylish in a good way and he uses San Francisco well. One amusing aspect of the book is that even though it has an American setting and American characters, many British words and phrases pop up. It might help a British author to have an American editor in such cases.

[Remy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The promise of crime noir and Chinese folk magic drew me in. The core premise was interesting enough (a hard-boiled SF detective wakes up in someone else's body and sets out to solve his own murder), but I sometimes felt that some of the interesting SF/fantastic premises throughout the story were sometimes forced and the various threads were not tied together at the end as neatly as the reader might expect. That said, the core detective thriller was solid and the gritty Chinatown setting well described. It was an enjoyable read.

[Ryun · Rating 5 out of 5]

9TAIL FOX eschews most of the cyberpunk trappings of Grimwood’s earlier works, going for a hardcore detective noir feel with Chinese mystical underpinnings. The novel revolves around San Francisco vice cop Bobby Zha, a less-than-perfect guy who gets killed in the book’s opening. Mysterious (or possibly mystical) forces intervene, and Zha is given a chance to find out what the hell is going on – and maybe find a bit of personal redemption in the process.

More: http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/sci-f...

[Daisy Gould · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it quite hard to follow, however, that may be because I am not really used to the genre. Although I found some of the characters quite interesting, particularly the homeless bunch, I found that it kind of fell a little flat. It started out well but as I continued to read it lead me to disappointment. Some of the concepts were shocking and the underlying idea was very imaginative, but it did not appear to have been completely thought out and the final explanation that tied everything together seemed awfully rushed and not well planned.

[Catherine Mommsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something about this book that is undefinable. I can't tell you why I like it as much as I do. I'm not easy to please and this book gets four stars because I've only read it once. I've read my five star books several imes and they hold up. What I can say is that I can't seem to stop thinking about Bobby Zha. It is a very well crafted story that drew me in from page one and held me in thrall to the very end.

I'd be interested it communicating with others who have read this book and found it intriguing.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another science fiction book that reads more like fantasy, with a mystery spine. There were a couple of things I didn't like--the copyediting in Chapter One almost made me put the book down, with all the plurals with apostrophes, and Bobby gets way too much gratuitous tail--but the plot itself kept my interest.

On the other hand, any book with a crackhead kitten gets bonus points for weirdness. I'd actually rate it 3 1/2 if I could.

[Neil Pearson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little bit underwhelming. The writing was very nice and the characters interesting but the mystery was a bit of a let down and generally a bit sparse. The first death scene was very well written and there was a beautiful bittersweet parargraph concerning a yard-dog that highlighted Grimwood's gift with words. I think the best analogy for this book is that it felt like a good tv episode, not a great film.

[Nick J Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

After a good start 9Tail Fox takes a pleasantly unexpected turn that led me to believe it was going to be an imaginative and exciting read. Unfortunately this did not happen. The pace suddenly bottoms out and the narrative seems to descend to mere wish fulfilment. I kept going till about halfway through and gave up. Maybe I'll try again but to be honest, if I give this author another go, I'll probably go for a different book.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent premise with a flagging execution. I could not for the life of me figure out how Zha knew that investigating multiple seemingly-unrelated mysteries would not only solve his murder but bring everyone suddenly to justice. Not bad, but for those who like unusual mysteries, I would recommend Mieville's The City and the City instead.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So wow, that was really good for a book picked solely on the colour if it's cover. ("What should I read next?" "I don't know, something red.") Supernatural noir set in an alternate San Francisco. Everything has a seedy underbelly. We'll call this 4.5 stars though, because the immersion broke every time a British word choice was thrown into this American setting.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

San Francisco police officer Bobby Zha is murdered, and then wakes up in somebody else's body. He has to solve his own murder, and try to make up for some of the mistakes he made in his life. A gripping and well-written thriller with a not-entirely-likeable protagonist.

[Kj · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was not what they're selling you on the back cover. But I was very glad the book was better than I expected - very engaging. I particularly liked that the author doesn't waste time explaining how impossible things happen - that's such a good mental jumping-off point.

[Clifford Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jon Courtenay Grimwood mixes genres blending a Hammett-style noir with Chinese mysticism and historical elements. With his intricate plots and engaging characters, after reading two of his books he is fast becoming one of my favourite writers.

[Cherelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly i thought it was Meh. I had an issue with the ending rear ended by the climax. I found the story and world to be interesting. It was one of very few mystery novels that I was able to finish. Personally I rate it 2.5 of 5. I may recommend to a limited group.

[Deirdre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this but actually I didn't care by the end about any of the characters.

The premise is interesting, a cop investigating his own death with some supernatural overtones but what it delivered was a rambling text with largely forgettable characters.

Your mileage may vary.

[Oana-Maria Uliu · Rating 1 out of 5]

It doesn't make much sense. I was curious to see what was going to happen, but I didn't buy any of it. A hot mess of unbelievable elements. And I'm not talking about the fox. At least it has an adequate ending.

[Jacque wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detective in SF solves his own murder... after he dies. good read!

[Terry Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An almost mainstream story from JCG . . . but not quite. This would make a good film. A detective wakes up in the body of someone else and sets out to find his killer.