[This is a fictional story. Any resemblance to actual people or places is purely coincidental.]
In the bitter winter of 1999, Qi Weidong, a technician at a forest farm in Northeast China, discovers a bizarre corpse frozen solid like an ice sculpture while making his routine patrol. The deceased is Zhao Jinbao, a famous local entrepreneur. Someone has deliberately posed the body kneeling in front of an abandoned hunter’s cabin.
Ma Guodong, the county police team captain, and Lin Xiaoman, a trainee fresh out of the provincial police academy, are paired up on a temporary basis. A seasoned detective with a thick Northeastern accent and a rookie with a head full of textbook knowledge spark an unexpected rapport.
The autopsy reveals undigested sticky-bean buns in the victim’s stomach. The time of death contradicts the time he was last seen, while the thickness of the ice covering the body suggests that the killer carefully planned when to dump it.
The investigation points to a strange fire at the forest farm twenty years earlier. The watchman, Old Sun, is now a key witness, but he displays an unusual degree of fear and evasiveness.
As the investigation deepens, Ma Guodong discovers a secret connection between the case and the death of his father, an old police officer who was in charge of investigating the fire and died in an accident.
