Shanghai in the Republic of China era: trading houses stand side by side, and banknotes change hands in a flash. A single ledger can bring a prestigious family to ruin, or make the dead speak.
Shen Zhaoheng was the third young lady of the Shen family, yet was never treated as one of their own. Her mother, Gu Hengjun, died in an old case twelve years ago. The Gu family fell, the Shen family profited, the Lu family intercepted the silver, and the Jiang Association divided the goods. Everyone said the times had left them no choice, and old accounts were too tangled to settle.
That is, until a ledger of the Gu family's true accounts resurfaced.
Shen Zhaoheng was thrust into the storm. The Shen family wanted her to take the blame, the Gu family's surviving heirs wanted her to exact revenge, the Lu family's bank wanted her to keep quiet, and the Jiang Association's merchants wanted her to bow her head. Meanwhile, the calculating mind lurking in the shadows wanted to use her to turn every old account in Shanghai into a bloody reckoning.
But she refused.
She would not be the Shen family's pawn to settle a debt, the Gu family's weapon of revenge, or a piece on anyone else's board.
She opened the merchants' association's books to public scrutiny, audited the Shen family's old inventory, investigated the Lu family's intercepted silver, exposed the Jiang Association's hidden cellar, and brought Lan's ledger into evidence. One by one, she restored to the light the names of erased female bookkeepers, dead shop assistants, silent accountants, and rewritten letters.
When someone tried to silence her with official documents, she filled the streets with accounts. When someone tried to frighten her with the dead, she entered the dead into the ledger, too.
This is a city where money and power are entwined, and a reckoning with accounts for a blade.
What Shen Zhaoheng wants to uncover is not only who owes the Gu family.
She wants to know: who has the right to write the truth?
