Second Sister Audiobook

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 was an orphan, and Nga-Yee, the librarian older sister who’d been raising her, refuses to believe there was no foul play—although nothing seemed amiss. She contacts a man known only as N—a hacker and an expert in cyber-security 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 forgotten about the real people on the other end—what is the proper punishment?

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“Reads more like a mainstream mystery than a noir until we meet N, the enigmatic hacker Nga-Yee hires…Their investigation takes us from creepy commuter-train-gropers to the dark reaches of the internet, where evil festers in many forms…Chan has designed an elaborate plot, but as the reversals and red herrings proliferate, the deepest mystery remains N himself.”

— New York Times