Trump Card

Trump Card is an urban-life web novel by the Qidian author Xia Xie, serialized on Qidian from October 2013 to its completion in November 2014, totaling about 2.59 million Chinese characters. The story centers on the youth Yu Ming: orphaned young and taken in by the master swindler Yan San (nicknamed "Leech"), he grows up steeped in the world of con artists and develops exceptional observation, rhetoric, and disguise skills, but heeds his adoptive father's advice and does not take up fraud, instead being sent to university. After graduation, Yu Ming becomes a private detective, taking cases at small agencies such as Star Investigation. As the opening states: "Deception is not an evil art but a weapon. Used for good it is righteous; used for evil it is wicked. A private detective is not a police officer, but pursues the truth all the same." Yu Ming's real difficulty is that he often understands cases through a swindler's mindset, so "truth" in his hands no longer has only one version: what matters is not what the truth is, but who can produce which version of it when the client needs it. As the story unfolds, he is drawn into the rivalry among the International Independent Investigators organization, the transnational criminal group "Spider," and the "Ice and Snow Alliance," becoming member "Silver 011" of the international investigators' organization and working alongside FBI agent Li Fu, computer expert Chu He, Du Qingqing, Nie Yuanzi, Ni Qiu, and others, while facing antagonists driven to extremes by childhood trauma and gaps in the justice system. The book links its main line through standalone cases, with puzzles advancing layer by layer, dry humor throughout, and a clean ending; it is a representative work of Xia Xie's urban battle-of-wits fiction.