On New Year’s Eve, renowned mystery novelist Ye Wenxuan was found dead in his study. His body was kneeling, his forehead resting against an open hardcover book. In the blank space on the page, someone had drawn a partial Chinese chessboard in blood, with only one piece: the General. He had died of poison, but the study’s doors and windows were locked from the inside, making it a perfect locked-room mystery. Stranger still, the study’s antique wall clock had stopped at midnight, yet the coroner estimated that he had died around nine that evening.
The only suspicious detail at the scene was a faded Year of the Horse commemorative coin clenched in Ye Wenxuan’s left hand. Investigators discovered that the coin had been evidence in an unsolved case from fifteen years earlier. That New Year’s Eve, a boy named Lin Mo had disappeared amid the fireworks, and his whereabouts remained unknown.
