Espionage in an Alternate Republic of China: The Singer Is the Red Party's Ace

Shanghai in 1937: neon lights mingle with the smoke of war. Shen Meigui, the star singer at the Paramount Ballroom, is seen by everyone as a money-grubbing beauty with a big chest and no brains. Beneath her rouge and powder, however, lies the sharp edge of Nightingale, the Red Party's top spy. She uses her beauty as bait and an air of sweet naivety as a shield, with her sights set on Gu Hanzhou, deputy head of a Blue Party intelligence station: a cold, abstinent man who believes in order.

At their first meeting, he despises her frivolity, while she plays him into her trap. But the shadow of the Japanese military police and corruption within the Blue Party draw them both into a deeper whirlpool. She deliberately misses her target to pass along a code, lays a trap with three thousand silver dollars, and uses a lie detector in the interrogation room to expose his growing feelings for her. He goes from suspicion to wavering, shielding her from drinks and getting her out of trouble. When she supposedly betrays him, he even spends his entire fortune to buy her back from a Japanese auction.

A small pistol is hidden beneath her qipao, and genuine intelligence lies beneath her sweet words. When the "ornamental vase" sheds her disguise and the "man of order" abandons his faction, they struggle against each other amid the flashing blades of espionage, torn between the nation's cause and their personal feelings. The mists of the Suzhou River, the lights of the Paramount Ballroom, their escape on a snowy night, and their final waltz: every step brings them to the edge of life and death.

On the eve of Shanghai's fall, gunshots at the docks tear through the darkness. Dressed in men's clothes, she walks into the unknown beside him, a man resolved to leave the darkness behind. This thorny rose ultimately blooms in her own way amid the chaos, radiating the colors of her country and her faith.