The Coroner's Astonishing Casebook

During the Jiading era of the Southern Song dynasty, Lu Zhaowei, born into a family of coroners, joins the Court of Judicial Review to uncover the truth behind her elder brother’s death. In her first case, “The Red Umbrella Frame,” the victim’s flesh has been stripped from their bones to make an umbrella frame, and the tip of each rib is engraved with the date of her brother’s death. She teams up with Xiao Yanzhou, a junior minister who has lost his sense of smell but excels at identifying poisons. Together they discover specially made cinnabar from the Imperial Medical Bureau hidden beneath the victim’s fingernails. As their investigation deepens, they expose a human poisoning experiment deliberately concealed by the Record of the Washing Away of Wrongs. And the surviving fragments of her brother’s autopsy notes have become the real killer’s guide to murder...