9Tail Fox

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From Publishers Weekly Grimwood, best known for his alternate-history Arabesk trilogy (Effendi, etc.), manages a new wrinkle on a classic noir plot line with this intriguing parano rmal mystery. San Francisco police sergeant Bobby Zha refuses to accept the department's conclusion that Natalie Persikov, a young Russian girl who has no familiarity with firearms, managed to kill an intruder, but he himself is gunned down in a sordid back alley before he can prove Persikov's innocence. After experiencing a mystical vision of a nine-tailed white fox, Zha regains consciousness in another man's body, a continent away from everything he knows. Using his new identity, Zha returns home in time to attend his own funeral and investigate his own murder. While the revelation of the killer is less than a surprise, Grimwood does sustain interest with a premise that could have fallen flat in lesser hands. (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist When you're murdered, you'd think your story would be over. Not so for Bobby Zha, a San Francisco cop who, after being shot and killed, awakes in New York, in the body of a man who has been in a coma. But Bobby is not as gobsmacked as you might expect because, while he was dying, a mythological, nine-tailed fox appeared to him and announced that he had one last chance to rediscover what makes life worth living and, incidentally, find out who murdered him. Grimwood, a British sf writer with a well-deserved reputation for mind-expanding ideas and entertaining characters, here takes a slightly familiar premise (man seeks vengeance from beyond the grave) and turns it into something wholly fresh, exciting, and suspenseful. Bobby Zha is a complex character, a man for whom death is the first giant step on a road to self-improvement (you might even say death's the best thing that ever happened to him). The typical revenge story, in other words, is transformed into a story of personal redemptionand a darn good one at that. Pitt, David Show more