Lin Shen, a former investigative journalist, wakes up in a morgue refrigerator. His face has been replaced with that of a death-row prisoner. The authorities have officially declared him dead, and his name has become the designation of the 17th scapegoat.
He has only 30 days. After that, the face that isn’t his will rot away completely, taking him to hell with it.
But he isn’t fighting alone. There’s an old janitor at the funeral home who has kept a record of 20 years of crimes in a math notebook; a female forensic examiner who carved 17 scars with a scalpel; and a hacker who uses code to keep the data ghosts of their parents online forever. They are all people this society has declared “dead.”
From the morgue to a villa on West Mountain, from Number One to Number Seventeen, from the channels of 1976 to the televised trial of 2024. When a “legally dead” ghost stands in court, when the voices of 16 families ring across the world through the internet, when a killer takes a bullet to protect him
justice finally rises again, in the name of the dead.
