The Borrowed & The Second Sister - matching numbers set

About the book

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Six interlocking stories.
One spellbinding novel.

The year is 2013, and Hong Kong's greatest detective is dying. For fifty years, Inspector Kwan quietly solved cases while the world changed around him. Now his partner Detective Lok has come to his deathbed for help with one final case.

Where there is murder, there is humanity. This bold and intricate crime novel spans five decades of love, honour, race, class, jealousy and revenge in one of the most intriguing nations in the world.

This is the story of a man who let justice shine in the space between black and white. This is the story of Hong Kong.

From the author of the acclaimed novel The Borrowed, a very timely and propulsively plotted tale of cyberbullying and revenge, about a woman on the hunt for the truth about her sister's death.

Chan Ho-Kei's The Borrowed was one of the most acclaimed international crime novels of recent years, a vivid and compelling tale of power, corruption, and the law spanning five decades of the history of Hong Kong. Now he delivers Second Sister, an up-to-the-minute tale of a Darwinian digital city where everyone from tech entrepreneurs to teenagers is struggling for the top.

A schoolgirl Siu-Man has committed suicide, leaping from her twenty-second floor window to the pavement below. Siu-Man is an orphan and the librarian older sister who's been raising her refuses to believe there was no foul play nothing seemed amiss. She contacts a man known only as N. a hacker, and an expert in cybersecurity and manipulating human behavior. But can Nga-Yee interest him sufficiently to take her case, and can she afford it if he says yes?

What follows is a cat and mouse game through the city of Hong Kong and its digital underground, especially an online gossip platform, where someone has been slandering Siu-Man. The novel is also populated by a man harassing girls on mass transit; high school kids, with their competing agendas and social dramas; a Hong Kong digital company courting an American venture capitalist; and the Triads, market women and noodle shop proprietors who frequent N.'s neighborhood of Sai Wan. In the end it all comes together to tell us who caused Siu-Man's death and why, and to ask, in a world where online and offline dialogue has increasingly forgotten about the real people on the other end, what the proper punishment is.