Telling you that the main character dies might sound like I'm spoiling the plot of the book, but since it happens in the first couple of chapters, you'd learn about yourself soon after starting to read the story. Anyway in this case death really is just the beginning and the fox was telling the truth and Bobby is being given a one last chance to set a whole number of things right, some of which date back to before he was even born. For in some ways the story doesn't even begin with Bobby Zha but with his grandfather and the early history of the Chinese in San Francisco, when the Tongs were more than just crime families.
Of course he's also going to have to figure out what the connection is between what's happening to him now as he's resurrected in the body of a coma patient named Bobby Vanberg, and experiments that were being carried out is Leningrad during World War Two. As Bobby Zha he had been investigating the disappearance of homeless people from the streets of San Francisco and the mysterious shooting of a burglar by an 11-year-old girl who doesn't appear strong enough to have lifted the gun used, let alone fired it.
Somehow his death ties in with all of these events and even though the trail is as convoluted as a pretzel he has to try and find his way through the labyrinth. He also knows that somehow or other, if he is able to get to the bottom of all this mess, he will also find a way to make things right with the people he'd hurt the first time around - especially his daughter.
One of the wonderful things about any of the books I've read by Jon Courtenay Grimwood is his ability to create a story that exists on more then one level at a time without seeming to try. In the case of 9 Tailed Fox not only has he written a great, action packed detective story full of interesting and unusual characters, he has also written a remarkable book about identity and the different ways people go about defining themselves.
Through Bobby's examination of his own life and his investigation into the crime, Grimwood gives the reader some interesting things about identity to ponder. What makes us who we are; our race, our gender, genetics, or is it something even more ethereal than that? When Bobby awakens in his new body his awareness is still that of Sgt. Zha even though he's as physically different from his former self as a cat is from a dog. So who is he?
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