Turning the Hand

"Reversal of Fortune" is a long-form urban legal thriller by the web novelist Xia Xie, serialized on Qidian and completed at approximately 2.28 million Chinese characters. No official print edition has been recorded. The novel opens with its central proposition: the law does not exist to stop people from doing something; it merely tells you the price you pay for doing it and getting caught. A thousand readers find a thousand Hamlets, and among them, nine hundred and ninety regard the law as forbidden ground, while the remaining ten treat it as a weapon—their task being to seize that weapon and point its blade at others. These ten are the so-called "star lawyers": in the courtroom and amid the streets, they summon clouds with a turn of the hand and rain with a flip of the palm, seeing neither black nor white, neither right nor wrong, neither good nor evil—only victory and defeat, only interest and gain. The protagonist, Cao Yun, was once a top police academy cadet. When his father was suspected of defecting seven years earlier during Operation Fox Hunt, Cao Yun was branded with stigma, forced to abandon his studies, and turned to law, becoming a practicing attorney. After building connections and reputation at Tianma Law Firm, he is asked by his mentor Lu Qun to go to Dongtang—an international commercial city resembling a Tokyo Chinatown—to take over the near-bankrupt Gaoshan Law Firm, so that he might investigate the truth behind his father's disappearance. The novel advances its main plot through stand-alone cases—a drunken murder, an intentional injury, a real estate expropriation and mining rights dispute, a multinational capital development case, and a jury trial—while linking the mystery of his father's old case through the machinations of gray-zone organizations such as the "Grand Alliance" and the Hyenas. Through courtroom debate, evidentiary offense and defense, and reversals of identity, readers watch a lawyer with no cheat-like advantage, relying solely on logic and legal technique, navigate the gray zones.