Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqī are classmates and best friends, but their childhood is hardly something you could call happy. Cheng Gong’s mother ran away with a licorice candy salesman, while Jiaqī tries—unsuccessfully—to earn her father’s love, who left his wife and daughter for a better life. Besides their family troubles, Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqī are united by a passionate love for investigations. Yet the children don’t suspect that the next secret dragged into the light will very soon end their friendship and force them to grow up abruptly. Investigating a brutal crime committed during the years of the “Cultural Revolution,” Jiaqī and Cheng Gong learn that their own families were involved—while the self-destruction that poisoned their parents’ lives grows out of the dark past of their grandfathers. Although the novel is full of truly Asian cruelty, Zhang Yu’e Shan turns out to be Christianly merciful toward her heroes: she leaves them a chance to change their fate, atone for the sins of older generations, and overcome the inherited trauma.