The Corpse Retriever Never Lies

Forensic pathologist Chen Yan is assigned an unidentified woman's corpse. The old knife scar beneath the shoulder blade is identical to the one she herself had at seventeen, and the whorl on the fingerprint screen doesn't belong to her. She digs up the 1998 case files on five girls from Chengxi No. 1 High School who drowned, and discovers that the three evidence-receipt forms all came from the substituted page seven. The malted milk in the victim's stomach and the consecutively numbered report cards point to a mass identity swap buried twenty-seven years ago. Her mother, Chen Suzhen, is a body retriever on the Lan River. On the first page of her ledger, it says, "The first body pulled from the water had the surname Chen." When her mother's face becomes her daughter's beneath the river lanterns, Chen Yan must dissect the body while digging herself out of the name "Chen Yan." The only golden finger she has is Old Zhou, her own machine that can turn a dead person's stomach contents into a twenty-year timeline, and a pair of fingerprints that are growing fainter and will ultimately belong to no one.

Recommended: The corpse has your face at seventeen, and your fingerprints are becoming someone else's.