The fifteenth year of the Taiping era under the Great Yu dynasty.
The Bone Examination Bureau was wiped out overnight. One hundred and seventy-three members of the entire household were executed, and all its books were destroyed. The official story blamed embezzlement and treason. The truth was buried among the bones.
Shen Duanshuang, daughter of the Bone Examination Bureau’s last director, was only seven when her family was slaughtered. An old coroner took her in, and she grew up among the funeral halls and piles of corpses. As a lowly registered coroner, she was barred from the main hall and forbidden to sit on a stool. Sharing a table with officials was a serious crime.
Everyone looked down on her.
Until she opened a skeleton and said three words in front of a hall full of officials: “That’s not right.”
The direction of a fracture could reconstruct a struggle, the color between the bones could reveal poison, and the degree of bone erosion could pinpoint the time of death. What seemed like a miracle to others was simply her reading the words the dead had left in their bones.
An airtight case? She overturned it with a single skeleton.
A case closed? She overturned the entire court on her own.
An attempt to silence her? The Ministry of Justice burned the funeral hall and sealed off the street, but she crawled out through an underground drainage tunnel and slapped the evidence down on the Court of Judicial Review’s desk.
Her father’s incomplete copy of Nine Records of Bone Examination could be recovered one volume at a time, with each major case she solved. Every volume revealed another piece of the truth behind the massacre. The day all nine records were reunited would be the day the Bone Examination Bureau was cleared of its wrongful conviction.
Pei Xingyuan, Vice Minister of the Court of Judicial Review, said, “You speak for the dead. I’ll keep the living off your back.”
Shen Duanshuang said, “Bones don’t lie.”
She believed neither in heaven nor fate. She believed only in bones.
