On a rainy night in the French Concession of Shencheng, a bloodstained qipao is discovered in a hidden compartment of the medicine cabinet at Yongshou Hall. Lin Yansheng, a female pharmacist newly returned from studying abroad, has barely shaken off the dust of her travels when she is drawn into the bizarre death of the Green Gang's third-in-command. A scrap of a prescription hidden in an acupuncture needle stirs the murderous intent of Gu Shiqin, the gang's young heir. But then he notices on her neck a plum-blossom birthmark identical to the one found in a massacre case twenty years ago. As a Western scalpel cuts into the corpse, a blood-red prescription slowly emerges from the web of poisons woven from arsenic and red-crowned crane toxin...
