The Borrowed

About

Six cases spanning fifty years of Hong Kong history, told in reverse chronological order — from 2013 back to 1967 — each featuring the legendary detective Kwan Chun-dok at a different stage of his career. As the timeline moves backward, the city transforms: the gleaming financial hub gives way to colonial tensions, political upheaval, and the raw energy of a place perpetually on borrowed time. Chan Ho-Kei uses the detective novel as a vehicle for something more ambitious: a portrait of Hong Kong through its crimes. Each case reflects the anxieties of its era, and the reverse chronology turns what could be nostalgia into something more unsettling — a slow revelation of how the present was built. A crime novel that solves its mysteries while posing a larger one: what does a city owe to the history it was built on?