"Green Compass" is a Chinese-style thriller detective novel of the Republic of China. The story is set in Shanghai in 1926, when the current situation was divided. A city is divided into two parts, the order of the Chinese community is loose and the concession has its own laws. People are panicked in the troubled times. Strange stories and rumors of haunted houses emerge in endlessly. Bizarre murders that seem like ghosts and gods seeking their lives are stirring up the whole city. Shen Yanci, who was born in a family of Zhengyi scholars in the south of the Yangtze River, holds an ancestral bronze compass in his hand. He is proficient in geomantic omen, qi and traces, and ancient methods of identifying poisons. He can reveal man-made tricks disguised as evil visions at a glance.
He formed an investigative triangle with Gu Xiao, a law-abiding and upright Chinese policeman, and Su Wanqing, a female reporter who traveled around the city to collect secrets. They worked together to solve mysterious cases such as the shadow of a coffin in a theater building, a ghost in an old house, strange noises in a morgue, and secrets in an orphanage. Behind all the scary appearances, there are no real ghosts and monsters, it is all carefully laid out human calculations. The unit cases become independent mysteries, with clues buried in each other, and layers of intertwining links lead to the age-old blood feud of the Shen family that was wiped out ten years ago.
Abandon the floating fairy tale, deeply combine Taoist folk customs, traditional hexagrams, historical facts of the Republic of China and original reasoning, and create a Chinese-style thriller atmosphere with a depressing and retro film texture. In the investigation of the serial mysteries, it not only writes about the tacit friendship between the three people working side by side to pursue the murderer, but also uses the conspiracies of troubled times to reveal the greed, obsession and helplessness of human nature, and reveals the core theme: there are no evil ghosts in the world, and the abyss is all the human heart.
