Twenty-eight years ago, Su Mei vanished under mysterious circumstances from a plant nursery on the outskirts of Qingchuan City.
There was no body and no eyewitness. The task force at the time was divided. After two rounds of screening suspects, everyone was released for lack of evidence. The case was filed away, becoming a cold case no one wanted to touch.
Retired veteran detective Zhou Cheng has been haunted by it for half his life. When the city police formed a cold-case task force, he volunteered to return and teamed up with young officer Jiang Yu to reopen the investigation.
A bag of soil from the flower nursery, sealed away for twenty-eight years, became their only hope of breaking through the fog.
As the investigation deepened, one old case after another, some more than a decade and others as many as thirty years old, came back to light.
Beneath the old case files lay forgotten victims, killers who had slipped away, and the oversights and regrets of the original investigation.
After all these long years, justice, though late, finally breaks through the soil.
Novice author seeks protection