The Hungry Ghost Murder

Rural China, 1995.

Inspector Bao Zheng takes his new wife, city-born Rosina Lin, to the remote village where he grew up and where his troubled elder brother still lives. He is worried she might find the place crude and dirty – but this soon becomes the least of his concerns.

The local Party Secretary is bludgeoned to death with a bust of Karl Marx. The police are baffled and Bao is drawn into the investigation.

He soon begins to uncover corruption and bitter conflict beneath the quiet surface of rural life, and then to suspect that the answer to the mystery may lie deeper in the past, in a story that touches on both his own life and that of his brother.

When the local police arrest a clearly innocent young man and force a confession out of him, Bao has to act fast – but can he do so, given what the emerging truth is revealing about his own past and very identity?