She Appraises Treasures, She Solves Crimes

Lu Qingtan was once the youngest antiques appraiser in the business, classically trained and mentored by a renowned expert. Then she made a disastrous mistake at a prestigious auction: a Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain vase she had certified as authentic was exposed as a high-quality fake. The client demanded tens of millions in compensation, she was blacklisted from the industry, and no one would listen when she tried to explain how sophisticated the forgery was.

Three years later, she opened a shabby antique shop in the south of the city, scraping by with appraisals for the locals. She had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid of anyone.

Chen Shuang was the police force's famously short-tempered detective. She rode a motorcycle in a battered leather jacket, and no one on the squad could keep her in line. Three years earlier, her partner had died in the line of duty while investigating an antiquities smuggling case. She had spent three years on the case, but the trail had gone cold at a bronze censer that had come from an antiques market.

The day Lu Qingtan was hauled into the station, the two women crossed paths.

Chen Shuang slapped the evidence onto the table: the Xuande censer supposedly connected to a murder. Lu Qingtan glanced at it and smiled. "The stolen artifact you've been chasing for three months is a wholesale knockoff from a fake-antique workshop in Luoyang. The bubbles in the glaze are wrong, the inscription on the base is wrong, and even the patina was made by soaking it in urine."

Chen Shuang didn't throw her in a cell. She took Lu Qingtan out of the police station.

From then on, two women became fixtures in the south of the city: an antique dealer with a keen eye and an even sharper tongue, who sat outside the antiques mall eating pancakes, and a detective who rode her motorcycle around the city chasing criminals and gave no one special treatment. They shared cigarettes, shared information, and shared the one subject neither dared touch.

Behind every antique lies a truth that cannot be spoken aloud.

And at the end of all these antiquities, the criminal network they are hunting is waiting.