★ Liao Shubo, a Hugo Award-longlisted author and a winner of the Galaxy Award, China's science fiction award, wrote this collection of mystery novellas set in Qianzhou in the early Republican era (the first years of the Republic of China), around the "Yu Family Troupe" (Yujia Ban), an opera company sustained by the Yu family, a declining cadet branch of the imperial clan.

★ Framed as "China's four great classical plays x Chinese-style hardcore detection", it fuses the trick-craft of the "new orthodox" (shin-honkaku) school of mystery with the folk aesthetics of traditional opera, retelling "The Peony Pavilion", "The Peach Blossom Fan", "The Palace of Eternal Life" and "A Dream Under the Southern Bough".

★ The play-texts are not atmosphere but clues, coded signals and metaphors for the characters' fates: the killer's scheme follows the sequence of a single opera, and testimony hides inside allusions in the arias.

Four volumes: "The Interrupted Dream", "Flowers as in Years Past", "An Everlasting Regret", "The Milky Way Spills Its Light".

"The Interrupted Dream" opens the series. The Yu Family Troupe was once the height of fashion in Qianzhou, and its leader, Yu Linlang, a performer of dazzling talent, one day died by suicide in bitterness, leaving a fog of unanswered questions. Years later, at a banquet in the Mingyue Tower, the eldest sister Junzilan stabbed Qiuhaitang and poisoned Yueyuehong, declaring that she had avenged Yu Linlang. As Yu Linlang's younger sister Yu Lingxiao, clear-headed and composed, works alongside the police to peel the case back layer by layer, the truth emerges. Yu Linlang did not die for love. Qiuhaitang, a dull and tongue-tied player in the troupe, used the enclosed courtyard of the troupe's quarters, the unknowing blindness of a blind musician and a child's love of mischief; together with Junzilan, this became a meticulous scheme six months in the making. Firecrackers, a horn and a fabricated soundtrack of a "bride leaving home" produced an auditory deception that finally broke the obsessive faith this devotee of the stage placed in acting itself. And the successive deaths at the Mingyue Tower are not as simple as they appear.

The three later volumes carry forward the rise and fall of the troupe and Yu Lingxiao's investigations. "Flowers as in Years Past", after "The Peach Blossom Fan", follows the Little Yu Troupe, which vanished after performing forty scenes and whose owner is killed when the play is restaged at the Mid-Autumn Festival fifteen years later. "An Everlasting Regret", after "The Palace of Eternal Life", follows young actors of the Mei Family Troupe in Mizhou dying one after another while rehearsing a celebrated play. "The Milky Way Spills Its Light", after "A Dream Under the Southern Bough", uses a reel of film left by Yu Lingxiao before Yu Lingxiao's death to uncover a killing that followed a charity performance by society ladies. The four cases stand alone yet connect, threading together the secrets of several generations of the Yu family.

Across the series, the play-texts are never decorative. They supply clues, coded signals and metaphors for the characters' fates; the killer's design follows the order of an opera, and testimony is hidden in the allusions of the arias. What looks like period colour is in fact the machinery of the puzzle.

Liao Shubo
A member of the Hainan Writers Association, a contracted writer at the Hainan Academy of Literature, and a member of the Hainan Online Writers Association.

Liao Shubo's fiction has received the Best Short Story award at the 37th Galaxy Awards for "A Wondrous Dream of Mars", the Best Novella award at the 35th Galaxy Awards for "Art", and a Readers' Choice Nomination at the 23rd Galaxy Awards for "Hello, Alien Chat Companion". "The Interrupted Dream" won both the First Prize and the Infinite Possibility Prize at the inaugural Chinese Original Mystery Spark Awards, while "The Wordless Stele" took the Gold Award in the literature track of Shanghai's "Yuan Chuang Wei Lai" (literally "original creation for the future") Metaverse Creative Competition. "Traveller, City" was longlisted for the 2024 Hugo Award.

Representative works include the mysteries "The 108 Cases of Chang'an" and "The Four Great Cases of the Yu Family Troupe", and the science fiction "Chronicles of Arles".

Liao Shubo has also published fiction frequently in magazines including "Science Fiction World" and "Galaxy's Edge".