Strange Tales of Jiang Cheng

Jiangzhou, in the southwest, in the first years of the Republic. Authority in the city is split among too many people and spies move through it freely. Qin Huo Le comes home from studying abroad and meets Song He, the captain of detectives, and the two of them begin working the same cases together. Fan Xiao Fan, a forensic doctor, joins them, and the bodies she opens supply the parts of each case that no witness will say out loud. The three of them work through a run of killings that the city has learned not to ask about, tracing them back through the people who profit from the confusion. What they are up against is less a single criminal than an arrangement that keeps ordinary people frightened and quiet.