Having lived a year in exile since his release from a work camp, former Beijing inspector Shan Tao Yun is entreated by the officials who exiled him to help with a murder investigation involving missing art, his former gulag, and his son.

"Shan Tao Yun, now the reluctant constable of a remote Tibetan town, has learned to expect the impossible at the roof of the world, but nothing has prepared him for his discovery when he investigates a report that a nun has been savagely assaulted by ghosts. In an ancient tomb by the old nun lies a gilded saint buried centuries earlier, flanked by the remains of a Chinese soldier killed fifty years before and an American man murdered only hours earlier....

Shan Tao Yun is an exiled Chinese national, a former Beijing Investigator, on parole from the Tibetan gulag to which he had been consigned as punishment. Leading a mule bearing a corpse at the request of a local wisewoman, he comes upon a traffic accident involving a government bus transporting illegal monks to prison. Two women in an approaching vehicle are shot, and one dies in his arms. Shan must find the killer, for his reward will be the life...