The New Casebook of Grievance Redress

In the tenth year of the Chunyou era of the Southern Song, the legendary Records of the Washing Away of Wrongs had become a thing of the past. Its author, Song Ci, had been dead for more than half a year.

Song Ci's only disciple had spent two years learning how to examine corpses and solve cases under his master's tutelage. The lesson he heard most often was: “Of all judicial matters, none is weightier than a capital case. Of all capital cases, none is weightier than the initial facts. And of all the initial facts, none is weightier than the examination.”

His master was gone, but the cases kept coming.

A baffling case came in from Yuhang County: a barrel-maker had vanished. There was blood in his home, but no body. Night after night, his wife dreamed that her husband appeared to her and said the killer was a butcher from the neighboring village, who had hidden the body in a cellar. The county magistrate's men searched, but the cellar was empty. The woman threw herself against a pillar in the courtroom, crying that she had been wronged, her head bleeding profusely. But without a body, they couldn't convict anyone of murder.

That was the first lesson he had learned from his master: not everyone lies, but everyone overlooks something. And the truth is often hidden in the things people miss.

From that day on, Zou Zilong began facing one strange case after another on his own.