Lin Shen fell from star detective in the Major Crimes Unit to alcoholic consultant in just three seconds: the three seconds when his world began to crumble after a failed mission.
Now pain and alcohol are eating away at him, until one rainy night he spots a pig on the street, its belly stitched shut with scarlet thread. When its swollen stomach is slit open, a curled-up female corpse and a peeled-off face are revealed, like a taunting letter from the darkness.
An even deeper shadow is spreading. Chemical drums wrapped in red thread conceal a male corpse in an abandoned factory; in a basement, an emptied-out abdomen has been stuffed with dead rats...
Every crime scene bears the same bizarre red thread, like the deranged artistic signature of a serial killer.
The clues point to a kindly old man in the neighborhood who quietly feeds stray cats, and his eerily composed daughter, a doctor.
This is only the beginning. The red threads keep spreading, and the next work is already taking shape in the darkness. Lin Shen, a wreck of a man steeped in pain and alcohol, drags his broken body step by step toward the heart of a maze stained with blood.
Because he knows that only the most twisted puzzles can pierce through nerves long since numbed. And this deadly dance with a madman may be exactly the kind of fall he has been waiting for.
