A Deadly Trail in the Manuscript

Chen Mo is an obscure detective novelist in real life. While sorting through the belongings of his late mentor, Lin Shen, a legendary mystery writer, he discovers an unfinished manuscript. The cases in it are bizarre, and their details closely match an unsolved “series of locked-room murders” from ten years ago. The manuscript even contains crime-scene details the police never made public. Even stranger, each chapter ends with a date, and every one of those dates corresponds to a recent, mysterious death in the real world. To uncover his mentor’s connection to the old case, and to prevent the next death foretold by the manuscript, Chen Mo is forced to leave his study and step into the “real-life killing ground” depicted in its pages. Following the clues in the manuscript, he discovers that he is gradually falling into a huge trap spanning ten years: missing witnesses, altered evidence, a mysterious organization hunting him in secret, and a “shadow writer” who can predict his every move... Each mystery he solves leads to an even deeper haze, while the detective-story conventions he relies on repeatedly fail in the face of real bloodshed and conspiracy. When he realizes that he, too, may be a “character already written” in the manuscript, there is only one way to break free: find a path through the cracks between reality and the manuscript, one that even the “author” cannot foresee.