The nights on the Mekong are dark enough to swallow you whole. After seven years on the river, A Jie takes a load of "dendrobium" to Laos for a Jinghong businessman, only to discover it has been switched for deadly drugs. With an unknown gang hunting him from ahead and river police closing in behind, he goes from boat captain to fugitive in a single night.
In an iron box hidden beneath the boat, he finds an old photograph of his father, who died fifteen years ago, and an insignia belonging to a 1987 surveying team on the Lancang-Mekong waterway. A hand-drawn map marked "Ghost's Crying Shoal" pulls him into a mystery spanning three generations.
A scorpion amulet, a military canteen in a raft used to send off ghosts, the words "Don't trust the photo" carved into something, and an old man from a Wa village saying, "Your father is still alive. He's been waiting for you for fifteen years," tear open the darkness of the borderlands.
Caught in the crosshairs of China, Laos, and Myanmar, and shadowed by the 1964 top-secret "Deep Blue" project, A Jie finally understands: the Mekong he has traveled for seven years was never a waterway. It was a net ensnaring three generations of the Chen family. And the door beneath Ghost's Crying Shoal is waiting to use his blood to unlock a truth buried for a thousand years...
