A review by nwhyte
9tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

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.