The Informer

The Informer is a full-length counter-espionage suspense novel in Zhang Baorui's Plum Blossom Party and Long Fei series. Its main narrative is the story arc known as Three Journeys South: The Informer, published by Beijing United Publishing Company in 2011 (an earlier edition was released in 2010 by Shaanxi Normal University Press under the title Three Journeys South: The Informer). Set in the 1950s, the novel opens with the assassination of Zhang Zihao, a Kuomintang general who had defected, at the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing. The Ministry of Public Security dispatches Long Fei, a senior agent known as New China's greatest detective, south to investigate. At the scene in Nanjing, Long Fei finds the embroidered shoe print of a woman and follows the trail to the Chu residence, where he meets the suspicious English governess Bai Wei and others in the general's household, and becomes drawn into a series of confrontations with enemy agents who have lain low for years, plotting to sabotage the railway and assassinate the senior leader on his southern tour. Eerie scenes recur throughout the book, including green corpses, a beauty at an ancient temple, and a body by the railway, while the plum blossom motif serves as a coded image running through the whole novel, giving rise to multiple mysteries involving a real and a false Bai Wei and layered questions of identity. The novel employs a multi-stranded structure of plots within plots and cases within cases, weaving together counter-espionage investigation, spycraft, and detection with tight pacing and frequent reversals. The adversarial relationship between Long Fei and Bai Wei, rooted in their divergent beliefs, forms one of the book's central emotional threads. This edition runs to 258 pages, with a main text of approximately 260,000 Chinese characters.