National Action

National Action is a novel by the police writer Cheng Lin, published by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House in October 2017. The novel begins with a shooting in broad daylight in Yizhou: two criminals open fire in public, causing three deaths and one injury within a minute. The bizarre gunshots thus expose layer upon layer of the local organized crime. After the case occurs, arrests at every level fail time and again, and an A-level wanted notice with a reward remains unanswered for four years. Who is the inside man, and who is backing the killers? The case becomes increasingly complicated. Following police officers such as Su Yan, the special task force, with support from higher authorities, adopts the method of using police from other jurisdictions under direct command, dispatching elite officers from various places and launching a months-long battle against the local organized crime gang and its network. The novel uses multiple narrative threads, showing both the composure and the price of police officers facing gun muzzles and life-and-death tests, and analyzing layer by layer the operating mechanism linking organized crime with power. It writes the stages of arrest, interrogation, manhunt, and deep investigation of remaining crimes in a detailed and solid way. The author himself has many years of frontline police experience, having long served in departments such as the technical section, criminal investigation brigade, and economic crime investigation detachment, which gives the book's case procedures, police language, and character states a clear sense of the scene. The work is regarded as one of the more daring and detailed works in recent police anti-corruption literature, and is also considered the original novel of the television series of the same name.