Contents

  Cover

  Also by Qiu Xiaolong

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for the Inspector Chen Mysteries

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Day 1

  Day 2: Morning

  Day 2: Afternoon

  Day 2: Evening

  Day 3

  Day 4: Morning

  Day 4: Night

  Day 5: Morning

  Day 5: Noon

  Day 6

  Not an Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Also by Qiu Xiaolong

  The Inspector Chen Mysteries

  DEATH OF A RED HEROINE

  A LOYAL CHARACTER DANCER

  WHEN RED IS BLACK

  A CASE OF TWO CITIES

  RED MANDARIN DRESS

  THE MAO CASE

  YEARS OF RED DUST (short story collection)

  DON’T CRY, TAI LAKE

  THE ENIGMA OF CHINA

  SHANGHAI REDEMPTION

  HOLD YOUR BREATH, CHINA *

  BECOMING INSPECTOR CHEN *

  INSPECTOR CHEN AND THE PRIVATE KITCHEN MURDER *

  LOVE AND MURDER IN THE TIME OF COVID *

  The Judge Dee Investigations

  THE SHADOW OF THE EMPIRE *

  THE CONSPIRACIES OF THE EMPIRE *

  * available from Severn House

  THE SECRET SHARERS

  Qiu Xiaolong

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2026

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  This eBook edition first published in 2025 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Qiu Xiaolong, 2026

  Cover and jacket design by Nick May at bluegecko22.com

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Qiu Xiaolong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1717-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1890-2 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1718-9 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. This work is reserved from text and data mining (Article 4(3) Directive (EU) 2019/790).

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  The manufacturer’s authorised representative in the EU for product safety is Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin D02 P593 Ireland (arccompliance.com)

  Praise for the Inspector Chen Mysteries

  “Newcomers and fans alike will look forward to how Qiu raises the stakes for Chen in the next book”

  Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder

  “The plot is full of unpredictable detours and sidebars that intensify the pleasure of following Chen’s vibrant curiosity. An exhilarating blend of recent history, mystery, and the writer’s craft”

  Kirkus Reviews on Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder

  “While series fans will be delighted at the background Qiu provides, this is an accessible starting point for newcomers … Qiu deepens his Dalgliesh-like series lead in his superior 11th novel”

  Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Becoming Inspector Chen

  “Both a scathing indictment of contemporary China and an explanation of how poet Chen came to be Chief Inspector Chen. Gripping”

  Booklist on Becoming Inspector Chen

  “Fans of mysteries about honest cops working for compromised regimes won’t want to miss this one”

  Library Journal Starred Review of Hold Your Breath, China

  About the author

  Anthony Award-winning author Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai and moved to Washington University in St. Louis, US, to complete a PhD in comparative literature. After the Tian’anmen tragedy in 1989, he stayed on in St. Louis, where he still lives with his wife.

  Qiu has sold over two million copies of his Inspector Chen Mysteries worldwide and been published in twenty languages. Many of his novels have been adapted as BBC Radio 4 dramas. Qiu is also the author of a mystery series set in Tang dynasty China, featuring the legendary Judge Dee Renjie. On top of his fiction, he is a prize-winning writer of poetry and poetry critic.

  www.qiuxiaolong.com

  Dedication

  In memory of my friend Zhu Xiaohui, who remained idealistic about China to the very end. I have borrowed his name, so to speak, for the hero’s name in The Secret Sharers, though it is often simply abbreviated as X.

  Also in memory of Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017), who sneaked into the China’s Young Writers Conference in 1989, the conference I mention in this novel. Liu was on the government’s blacklist at that time, and even though some of the writers at the conference had already tried to avoid him like the plague, I welcomed the opportunity to speak with him. We had a long talk in the hotel about literature and literary criticism.

  Also, I want to sincerely thank all the secret sharers around me. Without their great support through all these years, the writing of these Inspector Chen books would have remained an impossible mission.

  The list of my secret sharers certainly includes Chuck Turner, Norman Ding, Patria Mirrlees, Jeff Kinkley, Barbra Peters, Liana Levi, Francesca Varroto, Rachel Slatter, and, almost needless to say here, my wife, Wang Lijun.

  In fact, the list could go on much longer. And I want to quote a poem by Li Bai to all of them:

  I am about to sail away

  on the solitary sampan

  when I hear my friend

  coming, stepping in rhythm,

  like in a joyful dance.

  Peach Blossom Lake

  might have proven to be

  deep, a thousand feet

  deep, but not so deep

  as your friendship to me.

  DAY 1

  “The Hard Road”

  Li Bai (701–762)

  The famous wine in the gold goblet

  costs a thousand pieces of silver,

  and the celebrated delicacies

  on the jade platter are even more expensive.

  Despondent, I put down my chopsticks

  and my cup. I have no mood for the feast.

  I draw out my sword and look around,

  my heart full of confusion.

  I want to cross the Yellow River,

  but ice and snow freeze its flowing waters;

  I want to climb the Taihang Mountains,

  but a vast snow storm has swallowed them up.

  Like Lu Shang fishing, I shall bide

  my time to stage a comeback,

  or like Yi Yin dreaming, I shall sail

  far away, sailing past the sun.

  The road is hard for people to travel,

  so hard for people to travel indeed.

  Among the turns of the road ahead,

  which one should I choose to take?

  Oh, I would ride the long wind,

  cutting through the roaring waves,

  raising my sails high, to reach

  my destination in the azure ocean.

  Lu Shang and Yi Yin were two sages in ancient China.

  “Night Talk”

  Chen Cao

  Creamy coffee, cold;

  bricks of brown sugar cubes

  crumbling, a butter blossom still

  evoking natural freedom carved out

  on the decorated, mutilated cake,

  the knife scintillating beside it, like

  an unforgettable footnote. It is said

  some people can tell the time

  by the changing of color

  in a purring cat’s eyes—

  but you can’t. Doubt,

  a heap of ancient dregs

  at the battle of the Great Wall

  sinks in the leftover wine.

  Under the play of neon lights,

  the Uygur girl on the wall

  is carrying grapes to you:

  infinite motion, light

  as a summer in grateful tears

  when a bit of the golden paint,

  under her bangled bare feet,

  flakes from the frame around her.

  Nothing appears m
ore accidental

  than the world in words.

  A rubric turns by chance

  in her slender hands, and the result,

  like any result, is called history,

  justified by all the king’s men.

  Outside the window, no star is visible.

  Mind’s square deadly deserted,

  without a single pennant left.

  Only a rag picker of the ages

  passes by, dropping scraps

  of every minute into her basket.

  Written after the Tian’anmen Square tragedy of June 4th, 1989 in Beijing.

  To his surprise, Chen Cao, the former Chief Inspector of the Shanghai Police Bureau, now Director of the Shanghai Judicial System Reform Office—albeit on “convalescent leave”—received an unexpected phone call from Old Hunter, a retired cop.

  “Long time, no talk, Director Chen. I’ve heard you are still on convalescent leave. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. But it’s really up to those government-assigned doctors to say whether I’m fine or not, you know.”

  Convalescent leave, for a government official at Chen’s cadre rank, could have been determined more by political considerations than for health reasons. In Chen’s case, the decision to put him on leave had most likely been taken to keep him out of sight for a long—or a short—while before his final removal into the “trash bin of the proletarian dictatorship.”

  For the last twenty years or so, the term “proletarian dictatorship” had disappeared from China’s official discourse, but it was staging a comeback in the People’s Daily.

  “Got you, Chief. To be more exact, it’s up to the people behind the doctors to determine,” Old Hunter said with a long sigh, “and I am very worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You know what? I’ve been doing some classic Chinese poetry translation at home. And I have also been trying to compile a selection of my own poems. It’s interesting to do the two projects alongside one another. Between the classic Chinese poems from the Tang and the Song dynasties, and my own poems written in today’s China, you may find something paradoxical: China changes and China does not change.

  “It feels like there’s a tension there, but the classic Chinese poems seem to me to be always reflecting a deeper layer of contemporary concern. So working on poetry is as good as a change for me. And the translations can also be in tune with one of the Party’s current slogans: ‘Let Our Great Chinese Literature Go Out of China,’” Chen said carefully. He was always worried about the possibility of his phone being tapped, so he chose to speak in politically acceptable language. He had checked and double-checked his phone without finding a bug, but the line “One cannot be too careful nowadays” kept echoing from a corner of his memory. It was probably an echo from The Waste Land.

  “How are things going with you at your consulting and investigating agency, Old Hunter?” Chen asked.

  “Not much work for us these days. Certainly not like before. In fact, it really sucks.”

  Since his retirement, Old Hunter had been working part-time as a consultant for ZZ’s Consulting and Investigating Agency. For the retired cop, it had initially been merely an escape from the boredom of retirement. Prior to that, the agency had been literally a one-man operation—the tasks of owner, manager, chief investigator, consultant, and whatnot were all on the shoulders of one young, inexperienced man: Zhang Zhang.

  So Zhang Zhang had declared that the agency desperately needed the help of Old Hunter, a retired cop with a lot of experience as well as a lot of connections—not just his own connections, but his son’s too. Old Hunter’s son was none other than Detective Yu Guangming of the Shanghai Police Bureau, the long-time loyal partner of Chief Inspector Chen. Even though Zhang Zhang did not mention Chief Inspector Chen in a direct way to Old Hunter when he pleaded for his help, the agency head’s implication had been unmistakable.

  Old Hunter had accepted a position at the agency and now came in a couple of days a week, though those days were flexible depending upon his availability. There wasn’t much work for him, but he enjoyed talking to Zhang Zhang, spinning tales about various investigations from his long police career.

  True to his alternative nickname—Suzhou Opera Singer—Old Hunter found himself indulging in long, drawn-out narratives full of tantalizing details and digressions, with Zhang Zhang’s eager encouragement. Zhang Zhang was a capable, clever entrepreneur, but without any formal training in the field of private investigation. Whatever stories he heard from Old Hunter were not merely intriguing, but proved to be educational as well. It gave the old man a great boost to have an audience paying such genuine attention to him, even though many of the stories he related had happened so many years ago.

  “How about going out to have a cup of tea with me?” Old Hunter asked, resuming the conversation. “Don’t lose yourself in translating and writing all the time. You need to come out for fresh air, Director Chen.”

  Chen was instantly on high alert. Old Hunter was up to his old tricks again, he guessed. A seemingly casual phone call, then an invitation for a cup of tea outside, where the real talk would take place.

  “How about at that one-table teahouse?” Old Hunter asked.

  “The one-table teahouse would be great,” Chen replied.

  “Then I’ll be waiting there for you, Director Chen.”

  The teahouse was tucked in a forgotten corner of Yangpu District. There was only one table inside, and with the door shut and a sign declaring “Closed today for meetings” hung up in front, the two ex-cops had their privacy, the hot water, and the tea, if nothing else.

  “This place used to be a hot water house, in the days when most people still used small coal stoves for cooking and boiling water,” Old Hunter said with a self-deprecating gesture, seating himself at the one and only table inside and signaling Chen to sit opposite.

  “There are hardly any customers nowadays,” Old Hunter continued. “You know, the owner’s hanging on here just for the purpose of retaining the building’s status as a business. If he’s forced to relocate because of the city’s relentless redevelopment, he might be able to claim a larger sum of compensation. The tea is not that good, but still drinkable if you’re clever.”

  True to his “Suzhou Opera Singer” nickname, which was characteristic of his constant digressions, keeping what he really wanted to say all the way to the end, the old man was not in a hurry to broach the real topic of the day. “Open the door, you can already see the mountain”—in other words, get straight to the point—was not a phrase in his vocabulary.

  “Here’s the trick to the tea,” Old Hunter went on with a grin. “I’ve brought my own tea leaves from the office. I make a point of visiting Longjing, where Dragon Well Tea is produced, each and every year. Nowadays, you can’t trust the brands sold in the expensive tea stores, whether they’re state-run or not. What’s sold as Dragon Well Tea is a total fake, more often than not, with the leaves painted green. So, I simply make my purchases direct from the villagers there. The tea isn’t wrapped properly, but at least it’s genuine. When it comes down to it, a lot of Chinese people have lost their moral compass.”

  Chen then proceeded to inform Old Hunter briefly about the circumstances of his being removed from the police bureau, and about his “promotion” into the Shanghai Judicial System Reform Office.

  “Detective Yu hasn’t told me much about the things that are going on at the bureau. He certainly misses working with you, but whatever new position they’ve put you in, you’re still a high-ranking Party cadre,” Old Hunter said.

  “But what will happen next? People don’t have a very long memory. Out of sight, out of mind. Soon, I think I may be disappeared forever.”

  “To be disappeared. You are learning the language of the Internet fast, Director Chen.”

  “That’s only because I have a young, capable secretary surnamed Jin working at the office. I have learned a lot from her. Who could predict that I might have to start looking for a new job soon, possibly working as a private investigator just like you? That is, before I eventually get disappeared.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that, Chief Inspector—sorry, Director Chen. The Party would have to be totally crazy to touch you at the moment. You’re too politically sensitive.”