The Great Sheng Code stipulates that coroner work is a hereditary lowly trade. Those who practice it may not sit the imperial examinations, enter the main hall, or marry into respectable families. Shen Qingwu was born into a coroner's family all the same. She also has a secret she must never let anyone discover: the first time she touches a corpse, she hears the dead person say one sentence. That sentence is always a lie. When she was eighteen, a young woman awaiting marriage died in her bridal sedan. Everyone said she had refused to marry and drowned herself. But when Shen Qingwu touched the body, she heard the bride whisper in her ear, "I have never met my groom." Yet after examining the corpse, Shen Qingwu discovered that the dead woman was three months pregnant. Stranger still, the real bride walked into the county yamen dressed in mourning and pointed at the body in the sedan. "She was my maidservant. Three years ago, I buried her with my own hands." From a false bride in a bridal sedan to a village where the dead return, from a series of murders with no bodies to twelve unidentified skeletons beneath the imperial capital, Shen Qingwu gradually discovers that someone can decide who lives, who dies, and who vanishes from the world with a single household registration. Her father, missing for many years, may well be part of that colossal lie.
