The Taxidermist

A woman's skinned corpse was discovered on the roof of an office building, her body wrapped in layers of plastic wrap.

The police suspected that the victim had conspired with her killer to take her own life. Meanwhile, fingerprints found on a hand at the crime scene revealed that each of its five fingers belonged to a different person.

All five were involved in last year's murder case. Wang Chi, who solved that case, was transferred out of the police force after being suspected of having mental health problems. Desperate to crack this new case, his superiors took a risk and brought Wang Chi back, even though he had become a village police officer.

Wang Chi believed the skinning case was a continuation of the previous one, even though the killer had already been reduced to ashes.

Through Master Shan at the Natural History Museum, Wang Chi learned that the skinning method came from an ancient book dating back to the Ming dynasty. Master Shan's senior fellow apprentice had stolen the book long ago. It was said that he had been brought back from Harbin by former Soviet experts to research techniques for preserving corpses for the country's leaders.

Legend had it that the book recorded a lost art of embalming. Its author was an ancient physician who had failed the imperial examinations. Because of his fine handwriting, he had been tasked with compiling books for the imperial court, where he happened to copy the text from among millions of volumes.

Following the trail of the book, Wang Chi took the first step toward solving the case.