The Ninth Testimony

Thirteen years ago, Chen Yan's father, Chen Shoulin, was convicted of an old case on a rainy night. Thirteen years later, there were three knocks on the door at the morgue in the funeral home, and Chen Yan received a text message: Cabinet No. 3, Here to hear the statement. From the morgue girl, to the Mirror Case, Poison Class, Nameless Riverbed, Room 7, Overseas Calls, and Inside the Archives, all cases point to the same secret system: it can train witnesses, copy identities, migrate death records, rewrite living people as dead, and erase the real dead from the list. Chen Yan has a dangerous ability. He can capture the direction of the deceased's remaining testimony, but he cannot regard it as a conclusion. Every time he gets closer to an answer, he must step back beyond the white line and let the physical evidence, forensics, technology, procedures, and witnesses work together to bring closure. Interpol Song Ye abides by procedures, forensic doctor Luo Qing abides by boundaries, technician Fang Lan abides by data, and Lin Yuan and Cheng Ling abide by the names of living people. The deeper the old cases are investigated, the more people who have been "archived" resurface: copied identity shells, burned gloves, cut master tapes, cameras buried under the wall, and living people written as dead. Finally, Chen Yan must face a problem: If what the deceased left behind was not a last word, but a whole system of evidence that had been tampered with, who else could he speak for? This is a procedural suspense novel. It writes about corpses and living people; it writes about old cases and how each name was rediscovered by evidence.