Blood Mist on the Border: The 1991 Nehe Crime Files

In the bitter winter of 1991, pale mist billowed from the steam pipes of the Nehe Fertilizer Plant in Heilongjiang, shrouding the most horrifying secret on the Songnen Plain. When Wang the Lame, a tricycle driver, witnessed the corner of a red wool coat vanish into the snow, he could not have known he was standing at the beginning of a string of murders. Deep in a cellar, three provinces’ worth of souls were steeping in a crock of pickled cabbage.

Jia Wenqiang, a laid-off slaughterhouse worker, carved the words “Worse than beasts” into human bone with a butcher’s knife. Xu Lijuan, a kidnapped college student, drew 42 bloody marks on the cellar wall with lipstick. The black blood coughed up by veteran detective Li Guoxiong stained the case files, while Lin Xiaoman, a promising young forensic scientist, discovered the frozen earth’s death code beneath a victim’s fingernails. When 167 bloodstained garments were laid out in the evidence room, forming a map of Northeast China, people finally realized that the blizzards in this border city had long since entombed its crimes in blood-red amber.

From state-owned factories’ lists of workers laid off during restructuring, to five-yuan banknotes in radiating pits where bodies were buried

From the neon lights of a disco, tracking an unlit Mudan cigarette

This is no simple battle between good and evil.

When a butcher recites Das Kapital to mock the justice system

When an accomplice hands over a chain of fingerprint evidence kept under wraps

When a new edition of a criminal investigation textbook covers up the death certificate for stomach cancer on a gravestone

Beneath the ice of the Songhua River stirs the bewilderment and redemption of an entire age.