[Fast-paced cases + deduction + smart protagonist + suspense]
The Record of Cleansing Wrongs: Half a Lifetime of Mysteries.
Shen Yan, a poor scholar who failed the imperial examinations, hopes to live a quiet life as a clerk at the Suzhou County Office. But a murder in a locked room on a rainy night pulls him into a vortex: three scholars die mysteriously, and a death poem left at the scene points to the abandoned Thousand-Poem Tower outside the city. The case is also tied to an imperial examination scandal from ten years ago.
Using his family's inherited autopsy techniques, he exposes the supposed supernatural curse as a hoax. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Gu Linzhou, a junior minister of the Court of Judicial Review investigating in disguise, hides a secret plan to clear his father's name. The unusual ink on the poem is linked to the mysterious capital organization called the Celestial Pivot, while an old keepsake left by Shen Yan's father, a token engraved with strange markings, is quietly revealing a shocking secret about Shen Yan's origins.
From a string of murders in the water towns of Jiangnan to an old case involving princes in the depths of the capital's palace, from stolen army provisions on the frontier to the massacre of a Jiangnan salt merchant's household, Shen Yan and Gu Linzhou go from mistrust to working together as they hunt down the killers through layer upon layer of fog. When the Celestial Pivot's shadow falls over the throne and an assassination plot against the emperor reaches a fever pitch at a palace banquet, Shen Yan finally understands: the truth has never been just a matter of who committed the murder. It also conceals a century-old secret spanning court and countryside, as well as a fate he cannot escape.
His brush investigates murder, his inkstone holds the weight of hardship. This hunt, with lives on the line, will ultimately reveal the most painful truth behind every sacrifice and betrayal.
