A Stunning Figure in a Sea of Jumbled Words

On the seventh day of the twelfth lunar month, a woman's corpse is found in an icy lake, a jade token bearing the character “chaos” in her mouth. Xie Heng, a female clerk in the Ministry of Justice, and Shen Yan, the commander of the Imperial Guards, are old acquaintances bound by the blood feud between their fathers. Forced to join forces to hunt down the killer, they follow a trail from the plum grove at the imperial retreat to the mansions of the powerful. A string of bizarre murders all point to the old Jiangnan Poetry Society case, brutally suppressed eighteen years ago. When the blood-written clues “chaos, Jiang, south” come together, they discover that the killer seeks more than revenge: the emperor's life. Within the palace, a secret about twins, a gunpowder plot, and justice delayed are about to ignite a bloody storm that will engulf the court and the realm.