The Coroner Yan Niang: The Magistrate Seeks My Help on a Suspended Corpse Case

Coroner Yan Niang: A Mysterious Corpse Case, and the Magistrate Needs Me

In June, in Shengze Town, a body hangs beneath a beam. The authorities call it suicide by hanging. Shen Yan, daughter of a coroner, takes one look and murmurs, "That rope mark isn't right."

Fifteen-year-old Shen Yan is the daughter of a coroner from a lowly caste. No one is willing to believe a word she says, but the dead do. The direction of the rope mark, the dirt beneath the fingernails, the break in the bone: each detail speaks for her. A supposed suicide wasn't one, and someone who vanished can still be found. She examines one body and overturns one case; each overturned case leads to a ledger. Eleven years ago, eleven boats and eleven lives sank beyond the mouth of Taihu Lake, yet the register was wiped clean, without a single name remaining.

Her opponents are more ruthless than she imagined: they seal ledgers, switch labels, cut open boot shafts, and silence witnesses. They can even use a counterfeit seal to "legally" erase her grandfather's name. She won't challenge the ledger or the names. She trusts only physical evidence: a chipped seal, dried vermilion ink, and the reverse-carved character "Lu." If the ledger is sealed, she looks for the fire seal; if a name is scraped away, she makes an impression; if a thread is broken, she follows the nail holes and pieces it back together inch by inch.

Magistrate Lu Zhiheng solves cases by evidence alone, never by family status. One examines bones, the other questions suspects. Together, they investigate from the town to the prefectural city, bringing eleven years of old debts buried among the shipwreck's bones back to shore, one page at a time.

The dead cannot speak, but what they leave behind never lies. It all begins with a supposed "suicide by hanging," and ends with the examination of the last set of bones...