I don’t know about you, but I used to watch so many Hong Kong dramas when I was younger (it did nothing in terms of helping me learn Cantonese though). My favourite dramas were the police/mystery dramas, which I always found really exciting. While reading Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei, I was reminded of these dramas.

Second Sister, while exciting, suffers from a bit of a slow start. Nga-Yee, a librarian in Hong Kong, comes home to find that her sister (Siu-Man) has committed suicide. That launches her into an extensive flashback where we get her whole family’s history, which was why I say the book has a bit of a slow start. But Nga-Yee, unable to accept that her sister would commit suicide for no reason, finds the grumpy hacker N and begs/convinces him to help her find out who drove her sister to suicide.

The book really picks up after that, with N using both his hacking skills and his social engineering skills to find more information about the circumstances surrounding Siu-Man’s death. At the same time, we also follow an ambitious IT worker who is trying to impress a venture capitalist and propel himself into a position of wealth and power.

Reading this book felt like I was reading the version of a Hong Kong drama. True, it could get a bit too wordy at times with some of the tech explanations feeling like info-dumps, but for the most part, I thought the story moved quickly and I was eager to find out what happened. I was pleasantly surprised by the plot too – the first half of the book seemed somewhat predictable, but the ending totally surprised me in a good way.

In terms of characters, I really admired Nga-Yee’s love for her sister and her determination to be involved, even to the extent of being willing to sacrifice her life’s savings. N, on the other hand, was a bit harder to parse – he seemed like the typical grumpy and mercenary hacker and it was only in the last section of the book that we got to know him a bit more; personally, I would have preferred this information to be paced a bit better.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book! While the pacing wasn’t what I expected, I attribute that difference more to the fact that this was written in Chinese and translated into English. It would be odd for me to expect the book to be exactly the same as if it was written in English, so while I personally don’t like some of the info-dumping, I think it’s because I don’t have enough exposure to books translated from Chinese – does anyone have any recommendations?