The Fox Wife

In 1908, in the last years of China's Qing dynasty, a nine-tailed fox spirit calling herself Snow takes a position as a servant in a Manchurian household, using the disguise to search for the man she believes killed her daughter two years earlier. Her hunt for the elusive photographer Bektu Nikan carries her from the fox spirit enclaves of northern China to Japan, where a former husband and old rivals complicate her plans. Meanwhile Bao, an aging private detective with an uncanny knack for spotting a lie, is drawn into the case of a young woman found frozen to death outside a courtesan house — an investigation that keeps circling back to foxes, and to a woman from his own past he never stopped loving. As the two threads draw together, Yangsze Choo's The Fox Wife weaves Chinese and Japanese fox folklore into a story of vengeance, grief, and the long reach of old love.