The Avenger's Secret

The Avenger's Secret is a suspense novel by Zhou Yeya, following her earlier novel The Splendid Qipao. The story begins with a midnight fire: the film-crew makeup artist Hu Siyiao has just learned that her boyfriend and Liu Fangfei died in the flames of an affair, and then she herself is severely disfigured in a car accident. Shattered in body and mind, she does not disappear; instead, she assumes Liu Fangfei's identity and returns to the orphanage where she grew up—a place as gloomy as a prison. Meanwhile, the production assistant Jun Youhan keeps encountering strangers demanding Hu Siyiao's belongings: one is Jun Lian, the father of Hu's ex-boyfriend; the other is Lin Yu, a "twin sister" who appears out of nowhere. Out of curiosity, she accompanies Lin Yu to the orphanage, only to find it steeped in menace: the caretaker Aunt Hui dies mysteriously by poison, Yao Xiaoming, who once looked after Hu Siyiao, dies inexplicably on the way back to the city, and Jun Youhan herself is imprisoned in the cellar by the strange director. Why does Hu Siyiao assume a dead woman's identity? Why does Jun Lian insist on obtaining her belongings? What secret is the orphanage director hiding? As the clues are peeled back layer by layer, a harrowing story buried for thirty years comes to the surface. With delicate atmospheric writing and a narrative that lays ambush upon ambush, the novel unfolds a revenge plotted over a lifetime and probes the complexity of human nature amid betrayal, exploitation, and redemption: when a person has been utterly destroyed, is revenge a matter of mutual ruin, or the only road to deliverance?