The NINE LANTERNS: Book One of Lantern and Blade Mysteries

Luoyang, capital of the Silk Road, where a hundred languages fill the markets and a thousand secrets hide behind painted gates.On the night of the Lantern Festival, merchant Kang Boyan is found dead in his own garden, poisoned during his own banquet, the gate barred from within. Nine guests remain when the crossbar is finally broken: a Persian trade envoy publicly humiliated hours earlier, a son disowned two years before and never invited, a business partner overheard threatening the dead man, and a widow whose grief arrives just a little too composed.Su Xian has no official rank in Magistrate Pei's court. As a woman, she is tolerated in the interrogation room only because he vouches for her, and one serious misstep could end that arrangement for good. What she has instead is a mountain clan's discipline for reading a room, reconstructing a scene, and noticing exactly what everyone else has learned to overlook.Every suspect has a motive. Every motive falls apart under careful questioning. And the deeper Su Xian digs, the further back the truth reaches, past the garden, past the festival, into a decade-old crime the dead man built his entire fortune on covering up.Somewhere among the household's most familiar, most unremarkable faces waits an answer no one, investigator or reader, will see coming until it is far too late to stop it.A richly researched historical mystery set against the real cosmopolitan splendor of Tang Dynasty China, THE NINE LANTERNS is for readers who love a fair-play whodunit, a slow-burn reveal, and a detective who has to out-think an entire household to survive her own investigation.Perfect for fans of Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee, Laura Joh Rowland, and anyone who wants their historical mystery with real teeth.