Protagonist Au Nga-Yee's younger sister fifteen-year-old Siu-Man was found at the bottom of their block, seemingly died by suicide. Nga-Yee doesn't believe it, and tenaciously digs around to try to solve the mystery behind her sister's death. She found it odd that nobody except for three classmates and a teacher attended her funeral. Wasn't her sister supposed to be bubbly and friendly? She didn't even think of looking for her sister's phone till a month after her death.
We uncover a tale of complicated human emotions and actions, life's circumstances and and an unfortunate twist of life, living and growing pains. On the one hand, there is the cyberbullying and ostracization of Siu-Man after she put a supposed subway molester Shiu Tak-Ping in jail. The case went to court. After the guilty verdict, the perpetrator's 'nephew' wrote a note as 'kidkit727' and posted it an online forum to accuse her of wrongfully accusing his uncle of the crime, and it blew up all over the internet. 人言可畏. Siu-Man was portrayed as a vicious schoolgirl who's on drugs, hung out at clubs and also sold her body. After the online furore cooled off, Siu-man seemed to have gotten over it, and out of the blue one day, she jumped off the block and died.
Nga-Yee took out all her life savings to hire private detectives to look into her sister's death. She met N, a genius hacker and a 'revenge' dealer who seems to have all sorts of connections to everyone As the investigations went on, it was revealed that Shiu doesn't have any blood-related nephew. So who wrote that inflammatory and accusatory post that might have driven Siu-Man to death?
Nga-Yee is a mousey librarian, not tech-savvy and not clued into the lives of teenagers these days. She couldn't connect much to her sister — all she knew was to work hard to support the family, supplement the family income, and after their mother died, she worked even harder to put her sister through school and saved up for her university tuition. She wasn't too into the sister's emotional state of mind. She couldn't find any diary or clues at home. But she found her sister's phone that held a ton of clues, including a string of harrassment emails from 'kidkit727' asking if Siu-man was brave enough to die.
Nga-Yee realized that she didn't know Siu-man's other persona and secret life at school. With a lot of help from N, she found out that the online harrasser weaved an intricate web of secrecy to hide his identity. As the plot thickens and we see all the different characters come into play. There's a complex social hierarchy at school and tattle-tales, LGBTQIA tendencies which this mission school frowns upon, a school girl expelled, a snitch wrongly accused. TLDR, Violet To was also ostracized by the kids in school. Siu-Man might have helped her friend Lily Shu to snitch on her too. Violet wants revenge. Although she didn't expect Siu-Man to really take her own life.
Violet is 'kidkit727'. Violet is the one responsible for going after Siu-man for an issue that she didn't realize it wasn't Siu-man's doing. Violet is aided by her brother Christopher Song. The different surnames hinted at a painful family history. From wanting Violet to die in the same way Siu-Man did, Nga Yee decided to let her off.
A moment ago, as Nga-Yee looked at Violet in the window, she'd seen Siu-Man there. And that was enough for her to realize that no matter how much she hated this person, she didn't want to see her go down the same fatal path as her sister. She recalled Siu-Man lying in a pool of blood, and her own hysterical sobs. She wouldn't want even her worst enemy to be put in that position.
Finally Nga-Yee could hear the clear, true voice coming from the bottom of her heart.
No matter how much she was suffering, passing her sorrow on to someone else wouldn't bring her happiness.
As N withdrew his drones, Nga-Yee caught her final glimpse of Violet and her brother, and for some reason the famous first line of Anna Karenina popped into her mind.
"Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way."
Then we have a parallel story. There's this weasel of a character in Sze Chung-Nam of GT Technology. I was wondering why he is in here. I actually thought he might be Violet's brother, who wasn't named till the end. He had quite a fair bit of air-time in the book as an IT worker in GT that might be bought by tech company SIQ and he even met tech titan Szeto Wai and wanted a bigger role inn SIQ after the merger. I wondered what Szeto Wai was playing at.
It was only towards the end of the book that I knew what the writer was getting at. LOL This Szeto Wai is really N. N isn't just Nemesis. N's real identity is Szeto Wai, tech genius and tech titan. WTF!
Sze Chung-Nam is the actual subway molester, a serial offender at that, and pathological in selecting his victims. He has a penchant for grooming 15 year old escorts for sex and power gratification. N was actually going after him before he found out that this Sze Chung-Nam is the real perpetrator who assaulted Siu-Man in the subway.
I enjoy how the mystery unravels and how the story ends. There's no romance going on between N and Nga-Yee. Maybe, if a television adaption chooses to do that angle. In this book, their camaraderie comes across stronger. Through this revenge plot and engineering of things, there's a genuine connection between two souls who aren't used to talking to other people, but who aren't intrinsically evil either.
I especially like what N stands for, and how Nga-Yee found a resolution that brought her peace, and she's able to move on and finally live for herself. As the eldest child and daughter, she's dutiful and always put her mother and younger sister first. The emotions came through strongly in this excellent translation.
There were many ways for this to go wrong. If Sze ended up getting convicted of the lesser offence—indecent assault—and did only a month or two in prison, he'd be even more brutal and dangerous, and those girls might end up worse off, not to mention all the new victims he was sure to find.
.....................
This high-stress city could make these sorts of criminals double down on their behaviour. N decided that he would strike only when he was assured of success—he wouldn't act against Sze Chung-Nam until he was certain of putting him away for ten to twenty years, so there would be no repercussions for his victims.
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