Pei Qingluo, daughter of the chancellor, is obsessed with examining corpses in the Dali Temple morgue and solving cases through traces of ink.
Qin Zheng, a half-Hu, half-Han head constable, moves between the dark alleys of the marketplaces and the mysteries of the martial world.
Beneath the splendid robes of Chang’an’s golden age, corpses begin to seep with strange black ink, while a marionette suspended by threads performs a bloody murder before the emperor.
A fragment of a secret edict from a previous dynasty and half of a blood-jade ring lost by a Turkic merchant caravan set in motion a stunning plot spanning fifty years.
When their fingers brush the point where cold ink and bloodstains meet,
they tear away more than a murderer’s disguise: they expose the carefully painted portrait of the empire’s golden age.
