She Gazes from the Abyss

[Historical fantasy] + [mystery solving] + [formidable partners] + [suspense] + [geniuses] + [deduction] In the autumn of the fourteenth year of Yongzhao, Song Chen, Vice Minister of Justice, takes on a case involving a set of human remains. In the examination room, he finds a young woman in plain robes cutting into the bones with a knife. Her fingertips are stained with blood, but she precisely extracts half a piece of jade from the victim’s throat. “When poison has reached the vital organs, the hyoid bone turns blue,” she says coldly. The thin, cicada-wing blade gleams in the candlelight, illuminating the vivid red mole between her brows. She is Wenren Yue, the legendary ghost-handed coroner said to command the realms of the living and the dead. Song Chen has never met a woman like her. She can detect the unusual scent of southern borderland parasites in a corpse’s abdominal cavity, and identify lamp oil mixed with Western Regions pine resin from the teeth of a charred body. But when the Dali Court sends over twelve female corpses from the “Red Silk Case,” this usually composed coroner’s hand trembles as she cuts into the blood-red lines around the victims’ wrists. Looking at her pale profile, Song Chen suddenly recalls an old case buried in the files: fifteen years ago, during the Jiangnan plague, every coroner in the Wenren family died with blood-red lines wrapped around their wrists. Solving cases is like taking apart a nine-linked puzzle; every strange case hides sharp teeth. Gold-leaf Buddhist scriptures drifting through the air at a pleasure-boat arson scene, pools of blood frozen in the shape of lotuses at a salt merchant’s massacre: every detail points toward the heart of the imperial city. Song Chen uses his vermilion brush to work out the game, while Wenren Yue questions the dead with silver needles. Together, they weave a net from the tiniest clues, unaware that they have long been pawns in someone else’s hands. The shifting currents of the court mingle with whispers from the bones, while feelings born amid a life-and-death struggle prove more deadly than arsenic. When the blood-red crescent appears over the imperial mausoleum once more, the pair who have torn away the world’s false face finally realize that the most perfect scheme has made them bait for each other.