Sixteen years ago in a gray Chinese city, a sanitation worker made a disturbing discovery. She was unlucky enough to find a body—an unrecognizable mass stuffed into a zippered bag. For years, the murder remained unsolved, and the police figured it was an isolated crime in their otherwise safe community. But now that another body has turned up in the same place and in the same horrific condition, they know it’s time to bring in an expert.

The police, desperate for answers, call Han Yin, a handsome thirty-year-old criminal profiler. Renowned for his ability to interpret microexpressions and see through lies, he is the perfect man to investigate the list of seedy suspects. Along with the help of an aloof but sharp forensic pathologist and the beautiful chief of criminal investigation, Han Yin must navigate the city’s dark alleys and darker secrets. As a new wave of violence hits, will he be able to determine which crimes are false leads, and which ones might be linked to the brutal killer?

Gangxueyin was born in 1975 and has lived all his life in the coastal city of Dalian in Liaoning Province in China’s famed Northeast. Though his original career was in information technology, he describes himself as always having been “an out-and-out fanatic” about every sort of suspense and mystery novel. He has a special preference for literary works that reveal human nature, examine the inner world of criminal minds, and reason with tight logic. He also credits the novels by American writer Thomas Harris, which feature the fiendish cannibal Hannibal Lecter, with having made a major impression on him.

Gangxueyin began to write seriously in 2011, and in the following year his psychological suspense novel A Rainy Night of the Grim Reaper was published. His second novel, A Devil’s Mind, blends actual cases with literary creation.