On a stormy night, Old Master Chen, owner of the Chen Clock Shop in the old district, is stabbed to death with a watchmaker’s knife inside his store. The Longjing tea still warm at the scene and the lack of any signs of a break-in point to a crime committed by someone he knew. In the victim’s palm is half of a rusty gear engraved with the character “Su,” closely tied to Su Zhenhai, a clock merchant who disappeared thirty years ago. The enamel-painted mantel clock he treasured most has also vanished.
Newly transferred detective Lin Yan has barely taken on his first case when the restorer Old Zhou is killed in the same way. An old ledger in the workshop reveals the truth behind Su Zhenhai’s “selling a clock to save his wife” thirty years earlier. Su Wan, Su Zhenhai’s daughter, arrives bearing her father’s last words: “The truth is inside the clock.” The strange familiarity of Chen’s apprentice, Jiang Chen; a mysterious tombstone in the cemetery; and Su Zhenhai, missing for thirty years… Beneath layer upon layer of fog lies a blood debt spanning three generations, and a desperate obsession with life and death locked within the shadow of an enamel clock.
