[Phương Mộc - Tâm lí tội phạm 04] • The Blade of Silence

A perfect mix between Chinese versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Silence of the Lambs.

The chief of the Public Security Bureau himself shoots a hostage-taker, killing him, but the man's corpse goes missing without a trace. Is this a hoax, or part of a deeper conspiracy?

When a popular actress mysteriously disappears, the indecent images sent by her kidnappers are found to contain much more than meets the eye. Can he crack the code in time to save her life? Is he a loyal comrade-in-arms, or a deceptive jackal full of evil intentions?

As they sit before a polygraph, a relaxed reminiscence between friends suddenly transforms into a battle of wits; a refrigerator that rumbles on day and night becomes a scene of hellish fright; in a bath house that has never been open for business, apart from the police officer found dead on his feet, another heart continues beating faintly. In the bleak solitude of the mountains, desperate cries fall flat against a tacit silence between heaven and earth.

Through that remote village in China on which the sun has never shone flows a dark river. Its waters are churning with violence, blood, and despair. When a person's heart is full of darkness, evil grows there. The guilty one is not the person who commits the crime, but rather the one who created the darkness.

Say not that you are innocent. When you choose to become a blind fish in the darkness, then each of us—you, me, and everybody else—becomes a part of that darkness.

Will Fang Mu, who has survived his journey through Profiler and Skinner's Box, continue to choose goodness and strength from the swirling vortex that is his fate?

## Editorial Review

Author Lei Mi has been called the king of the Chinese crime novel. Employed at China Criminal Police University as a teacher of criminal psychology, he has a clear insight into all sorts of criminal behavior. Early in 2007, with the publishing of the Psychological Criminals series (which, along with the prequel The Seven Readers, has been called the Fang Mu series by readers), this book's performance was no more than mediocre at first in a Chinese marketplace that had grown accustomed to European and American crime novels. Still, a small number of readers became deeply fascinated by it.

Before they were formally published, the second book, Skinner's Box, and the third book, Blade of Silence, had already gained 600,000 fans by word of mouth alone. By December 2012, City Lights, the fourth book in the Psychological Criminals series, was hot off the press and had climbed straight to fifth place in Amazon China's new release rankings list in the suspense category. In this series of novels, you will read about an unprecedented new master sleuth.

Using a deft pen planted firmly in the foundations of realism, a heavy flavor of the aesthetics of crime, trains of thought and reasoning that are totally different from what ordinary people might be used to, and reflections on ethics that are truly thought-provoking, the author has provided readers with a new perspective from which to understand a realistic version of China society.