It begins with a fatal alarm call. After telling his lover to wake him early during a bout of evening drinking, illiterate village gangster Hongyang is found dead the next morning. The rest of the novel is a rural whodunnit, a masterclass in suspense that pieces together how Hongyang connived and punched his way through the criminal underworld to the top of his small town in Jiangxi province. This was A Yi’s debut novel back in 2017, before he went on to have a starstudded literary career. It drew heavily from his own experiences as a policeman in a similar town as the novel’s setting.