Seventy-Two Needles

On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month in the seventeenth year of Yongchang, Great Yong, seventy-three members of the Li family of Longxi died overnight.

The official explanation was an epidemic. Only ten-year-old Li Shengnan knew they had been poisoned. As her father pushed her into a secret passage, he said just one thing: “Live. Come back when you can cut open their hearts.”

Ten years later, she works as a funeral specialist at Guichen Studio in the west of the city. No one knows that the young woman who grooms and makes up the dead keeps seventy-three silver needles in her kit, one for every family member who failed to walk out of that mansion alive. Nor does anyone know that when she examines a corpse, those terrifyingly steady hands are uncovering more than just the cause of death. Until Dong Ruhai, chief constable of the Capital Prefecture, opens the door to Guichen Studio. One investigates in the open, the other examines bones in secret. From murders in the streets to palace secrets, from a bride who faked her death to a headless general, old cases resurface one by one, and every clue points to the same name: Prince Yong Chengze, the Ninth Prince.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.