Lies among the ashes burn more fiercely than flames.
When a century-old theater went up in flames to the strains of The Phoenix Hairpin, Detective Captain Lu Chenzhou pulled a blue-and-gold silk fan from the fingers of a charred corpse. The victim was Cheng Yunsheng, a Peking opera legend. But the autopsy revealed that the scar on the right hand of the 63-year-old body exactly matched a birthmark on the arm of Cheng Xuesheng, her missing adopted daughter.
Three minutes were inexplicably missing from the fire surveillance footage. And the supposedly surviving "Cheng Xuesheng" had a plum blossom brand on her collarbone, matching the mark of death used by a military intelligence sleeper agent twenty years earlier. During his investigation, Lu Chenzhou discovered that a miniature film reel hidden inside Cheng Yunsheng's treasured jade hairpin contained a spy roster, with fingerprints matching senior officials in the public security system.
The deadliest aria rang out on the seventh night. Cheng Yunsheng, "resurrected" in the morgue, tore off her mask to reveal the same face as Cheng Xuesheng. They were mirror doubles created by military intelligence's "Twin Butterfly Project." When Lu Chenzhou used a bloodstained pocket watch to open a hidden door beneath the stage, the old theater director was painting an opera mask on the real Cheng Yunsheng's corpse, while Cheng Xuesheng's gun was already aimed at his back...
In this deadly game spanning twenty years, every line of song was a code, and every costume was stained with human blood. When Lu Chenzhou finally deciphered the Morse code in the pocket watch, he discovered the cruelest truth: every glance from Cheng Xuesheng had been a calculated killing move, and the deadliest secret was always hidden in the musical shifts of the opera.
