"An original literary work with strong IP potential for adaptation." It "combines a gripping story, a sense of its era, and characters whose issues the public can debate," the report notes, contrasting it with "a debut author commanding a record-breaking rights fee."
— China Publishing & Media Journal (2026-10-10)

"Zero abuse of female characters, respect for the reader's intelligence, respect for every character... If my shelf could hold only one suspense novel, I would not hesitate to choose The Spring Rain Night."
— Reader review

"Twist after twist; I finished it in one sitting and could not stop. Both the plot and the writing break new ground, and many passages gave me chills."
— Reader review

★ A wife is found dead. The police call it suicide. At her funeral, her husband stands up and confesses to killing her. One murder case, two irreconcilable conclusions, and twenty years of buried secrets waiting to be dug up.
★ Named a flagship suspense novel of 2026 on Zhihu Yanyan Story. It topped the platform's long-form chart, together with its reader-rating, popularity and new-release charts. A popularity score of 1.244 million and over 97% approval. Its film and TV rights sold for millions of RMB, a record for a single work on the platform, and a leading streaming platform is developing it into a top-tier series.
★ Told in Rashomon-style, multi-perspective pieces, the story spans 2002 to 2019, linking a smuggling underworld, a hundred-million-yuan fraud and Shanghai's overseas-educated elite. Everyone describes a different woman.
★ A woman born into poverty rises step by step through the cracks of fate. In the end, she turns herself into bait and plays her last game, tearing up every secret hidden in the dark. Readers of Journey Under the Midnight Sun and The Silent Patient will find a familiar trap here.

Late one night at a hot-spring hotel, a woman falls from the twenty-second floor. There is no trace of a second person at the scene. She had a history of illness, and she left a suicide note. The police quickly rule it a suicide.

Three days later, at her funeral, her husband, a professor of logic named Tang Yinong, speaks up: he is the one who killed his wife. In the interrogation room, he lays out the crime step by step. Yet the evidence for suicide is equally airtight.

The case lands with the police officer Yuan Youfang. The deeper she digs, the blurrier the dead woman, Lin Jiaorui, becomes. The wife her husband describes, the partner the old accomplice Sun Huaifu knew, the acquaintance the ally Maggie remembers, the sister in Lin Jiaoye's memory — every one of them is a different woman.

The story returns to 2002, when she is still struggling in the mud of an urban village. Over the next two decades she moves from a smuggling underworld into a hundred-million-yuan fraud, then into Shanghai's overseas-educated elite, rising step by step through the gray zones. The villains of her past never stop hunting her, and her husband suffers one accident after another: a stalled elevator, failed brakes. She comes to understand that as long as she is alive, the hunt will never stop.

So, nineteen years later, a final game — with herself as the bait — quietly closes.

Spanning 2002 to 2019 and told in Rashomon-style, multi-perspective pieces, the novel turns one wife-killing case into two decades of darkness, with twist building on twist, until the reader realizes that the funeral itself was the last move the dead woman planned.

Li Mao
A new-generation suspense writer, known for crime and suspense fiction and for multi-perspective ensemble storytelling. Representative work: The Spring Rain Night.

Part One
Prologue: 2019
Book One: 2019 · Guangzhou, the Wife-Killing Case
Book Two: 2002 · Guangzhou
Book Three: 2008 · Guangzhou
Book Four: 2013 · Shanghai

Part Two
Book One: 2019 · Guangzhou, the Wife-Killing Case (flashback to 2001–2002 · Guangzhou)
Book Two: 2008 · Guangzhou
Book Three: 2014 · Beijing

Epilogue
Bonus Story: "Nowhere to Bury the Dead"