The Song law is clear: women may not stand in court or take up the brush to decide cases.
Shen Zhiwei is determined to live in defiance of it.
Born an orphan from a fallen aristocratic clan, she has a photographic memory and an eye for detail. No drop of blood or hairline crack in porcelain escapes her notice. A death-row prisoner wrongly convicted in the countryside, a bizarre poisoning in the marketplace, an old case involving the capital’s powerful families that was covered up for ten years: one after another, these cases land at her door, and she overturns each one by spotting a flaw everyone else has missed.
But the further she investigates, the closer she comes to an old case burned by the court, and to the truth behind her father’s “sudden death.”
Some warn her: A woman wielding the brush is bound to fail.
She simply spreads out the case file and says softly, “By reason, it should be so.”
In this case, she means to overturn not just a verdict against one dead person, but an entire court that refuses to let women speak.
