Customer Reviews

9TAIL FOX

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I spotted 9Tail Fox a few months ago on Night Shade's website and wanted to read it ever since (mostly because of the cover). I found it on Amazon for a pittance, read it, and was disappointed. It's not a terrible book, but I didn't really enjoy reading it, either.

The things I liked were mostly in the writing and in the little parts of the story that didn't involve Sergeant Zha. I liked how there weren't any giant infodumps hurled at me; instead, small bits of information were scattered around like breadcrumbs. I had to follow them to arrive at a complete picture, and it was kind of fun. As long as I don't have to work too hard to understand a character, I don't mind doing a bit of piecing together. Sometimes it's nice learning about people one chapter at a time, instead of having it all crammed together in one or two paragraphs.

The supernatural elements were pretty sparse-- this isn't so much an urban fantasy mystery as a mystery with paranormal elements vaguely touching the edges of it. And it's not even so much a mystery as it is a story about a policeman who messed up everything in his life, including his death. (It's got so many layers in it I'm surprised it hasn't been used in one of my English classes. Aha.)

I think my biggest difficulty with this book was that I didn't like Sergeant Zha. In fact, I hated him most of the time. I think I was supposed to dislike him, though, since multiple times throughout the book characters said he was a bastard and a scoundrel, which is a pretty big clue that, y'know, he isn't a good guy. Plus he doesn't really do anything to contradict that until maybe the very end of the story.

It's a very hard thing to do, reading a book where the protagonist isn't meant to be liked. I've had better luck with that sort of thing before (Empress, for instance), but for some reason it didn't work for me here. I liked some of the other characters, like the ex-military homeless people who help Sergeant Zha out, but overall the book isn't filled with people I care about (or want to read about).

9Tail Fox is an interesting book with a good plot, and though I didn't enjoy all of it, it wasn't horrible at all. It just wasn't my thing.

I read this book in a week. It was hard to put down and thoroughly enjoyable.

The book is a murder mystery, in the hard-boiled detective style. Bobby Zha is a SFPD officer based in Chinatown, more at home with vagrants and homeless people than the members of the force. So far, so good. The book twists by having the protagonist killed within the first few chapters. He then has to solve his own murder. Sweet setup.

The Nine Tail Fox of the title is a Chinese mystical creature, and it is the conceit of the book that such a creature is real. There isn't much other SF or Fantasy than that. The rest of the book is a straight-up detective novel, tightly plotted and well written.

To his credit, the author writes about a hard-boiled hero who is a real SOB. The hero's journey in the book is as much about realizing and resolving that character flaw as it about solving the crime. Both threads of the story work.

I liked that the book was set in San Francisco. The city was a real part of the story, with settings in Chinatown, Russian Hill and elsewhere, all of them detailed. Chinatown in particular comes off in a believable way, and doesn't feel like the tourist postcard version. Snarky comments abound, for example one about tourists who come looking for the Beats, yet shop at Borders.

Truly delightful. Recommended.

From Night Shade Books.

Man. I traveled from Southern Arizona to Wash D.C. today and spent my time with Mr. Grimwood. Thankfully, I had a two hour layover in Dallas, where we sat and sweated on the tarmac. I say thankfully, because I had such a damn good book with me, I didn't even realize I was being held hostage by the airlines once again. The time worked out well. I'd read the first three chapters yesterday and then as we crossed the Patomac into Reagan International, I finished the story. Glorious last paragraph which I could tell the author worked, reworked and perfected. I closed the book with a smile.

When I bought the book in SLC, it was the cover that grabbed me. Jon Foster did a terrific job, but whatever he achieved was multiplied by the really amazing design work that Claudia did. I keep looking at the cover. I really dig it. I want a cover like that!!!

And the book? The story of Bobbi Zha? I'm now a fan of Mr. Grimwood.

From the sweeping plot to the subplots to the humanism in the characters, it's the kind of stuff I like to read. I'll read whatever he writes. Did the book have a few problems? Sure. A rough spot here or there, and a question I had left unanswered, but these were really washed aside by raw humanity of the piece and the author's ability to make San Francisco, not just the setting for the novel, but a member of the cast.

Tagline on the cover says: "A dead cop must solve his own murder!"
On the back: "... His sudden and unexplained murder leaves his family reeling, and the SFPD bewildered. But nobody is more bewildered than 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."

Sounds pretty average paranormal-mystery, right? Only the author's style is more mainstream fiction, with a dollop of magical realism and straight fantasy and a tad of SF (supposedly this takes place in the near-future), and quite a bit of suspense/thriller mixed in. There's also psychological fiction--where we see brief glimpses of the troubled past and relationships of these characters... fragments that add to character, but not at all to plot. There is wish-fulfillment fantasy in that the character wakes in another body that has wealth and power and good-looks (the one big hit to my suspension of disbelief came when he wakes in a body that has been comatose for perhaps two decades and instantly is up and walking--apparently with no atrophied muscles! hmmm!).

There are plenty of other things that strain credulity, but they are also magical and mystical, and there is compellingly good writing going on that is satisfying on a level that doesn't want to settle for the tried and true. Life isn't at all explicable and the strangeness and complexities in this tale may confuse, but they also feel right.

The mystery is convoluted--involving may disparate elements, many only appearing in passing: a young girl who claims to have killed an intruder, human and animal experimentation, the Russian mob, a US general, missing homeless people, dirty cops, Stalin... Although it may be possible, this doesn't seem to be the kind of mystery one can trace through clues. It's more of the suspense/thriller kind, at times, with fancy watches and name-brand suits, powerful motorcycles and long-range rifles... And then there's the fox, more a tie to the detective's heritage and non-beliefs, than anything. Zha isn't sure what to believe, and neither are we, the readers. But it's a crazy ride, for those who enjoy that sort of thing.

For some reason I have a weakness for Courtney's books, even though they are quite atypical and strange... or maybe it's because of that? But they're definitely not for everyone.

I'm not sure why some thing that this is well written. The _idea_ of the book is a good one: guy is murdered, wakes up in another body, tries to find his killer and fix what he royally messed up in his personal life. However, the author just can keep the character, Zha, straight. Is Zha misunderstood or was his pending divorce really his fault? Zha could be a real person if the author could do more with him. The author meanders through the story. Grimwood obviously had a clear beginning and end to his story but the middle is just full of confusion.

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. 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

Very well written. Great characters. Interesting plotline, which although complicated, got wrapped up neatly at the end. I immediately went looking for other Jon Courtenay Grimwood books.

Having enjoyed Stamping Butterflies by Grimwood previously I was looking forward to this one. Initially I was hooked, the story of policeman Bobby Zha and how he is murdered, only to come back in the body of a long term coma patient, is well done and involving. The gradually revealed back-story for Bobby and other characters keeps the story moving forward and towards what you expect will be a suitable conclusion. I was really keen to get to there and have all the disparate threads come together and the various mysteries resolved.

Unfortunately it doesn't end up well at all, it fails to tie up many of the most important threads of the story. The reader never really finds out how Bobby's consciousness ended up in the coma patient's body, rogue medical treatment or Chinese magic? The former *seems* to have failed which one assumes leaves only the latter, but it's never really made clear. Did the doctor doing the rogue brain transfer experiments die by accident or was he murdered? You never find out. Exactly who shot Bobby and how he died is never properly explained. An art dealer is killed who is somehow connected to a valuable Russian icon involved in a case Bobby was working on when he was murdered, but the reader never finds out why he was killed (Did he have the icon at the time? If so, how did he get it and why?) and who killed him. There seem to be two two different icons that get swapped around at least once, but why, and what they (or the original one anyway) contain is never made clear either.

All in all a well written involving story with great characters and some interesting mysteries that mixes elements of police procedural, SF, fantasy and thrillers that is sadly let down by a muddled ending with too many loose threads and confusion. Stamping Butterflies was much better, and I hope End of the World Blues is more like that, or I'll probably not read another book by this author.