Shanghai, The People's Republic of China. Eight bodies chained together and horribly mutilated are found in the mud of the Huangpu River. Sun Piao, a Senior Investigator with the Homicide Squad of the PSB, has drawn the short straw . . . the case stinks of Party and Security Service involvement. Wu, the Chief Medical Examiner, refuses to carry out the autopsies.

No hospital will take the bodies in. And Comrade Officer Liping, Piao's head of department, knows things about the murders that he should not know. Piao should dump the case, he knows it; but to walk away from another politically difficult case goes against the grain. He has had to walk away from too many things, too many times. Privileged Shanghai society, the labyrinthine political system, the lowest depths of China's criminal world and its repressive penal institutions . . . Piao's quest brings him into intimate contact with all layers of Chinese society as he unravels its secrets.