num_pages: 495
description: Chan Ho-Keis 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 schoolgirlSiu-Manhas committed suicide leaping from her twenty-second floor window to the pavement below. Siu-Man is an orphan and the librarian older sister whos been raising her refuses to believe there was no foul playnothing 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-Mans 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.
language: English
title: Second Sister
publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat