Truth demands witnesses. Are you ready to testify?

In Taiwan Case Files - Volume VII, investigative journalist-turned-novelist Chang Li Yen returns with eleven interwoven stories that peel back the polite skin of modern Taiwan to expose what festers beneath. Each tale is inspired by true events and shaped with surgical precision, where every crime becomes an autopsy of conscience, every death a mirror held to society's decay. Through Chang's unflinching prose, readers confront the places where justice falters, empathy erodes, and the meaning of "truth" is ground between power and guilt.

The volume opens with "Nether Pact: The Ghost-Month Classroom," a chilling parable of sexual abuse and institutional betrayal. When a professor's victim dies by suicide and her spirit returns for vengeance, the haunting becomes both supernatural and moral-an indictment of a system that calls predators "clean." The retribution that follows is as meticulous as it is merciless, forcing the living to relive every torment the dead endured.

From there, the book descends through Taiwan's layered darkness:

"The Knife That Gnaws at the Old" recounts a grandson's drunken rage and the quiet horror of generational neglect in a fishing village where love turns parasitic.

"Core-Chip: City Under Siege" explodes into techno-thriller territory, fusing semiconductor espionage, ritualistic killings, and the corrosion of national ambition.

Later stories such as "Darknet Lost," "Cuihe Blood Curse," and "Mirror Prison" explore digital sin, occult vengeance, and psychological confinement, forming a lattice of guilt that binds the living and the dead alike.
Each case may stand alone, yet together they create a single x-ray of a society anesthetized by progress and haunted by what it refuses to see.

Chang's narrative style blends the clinical discipline of reportage with the lyricism of noir. His language gleams like a scalpel: precise, rhythmic, and laced with empathy that cuts deeper than pity. He writes not to glorify evil but to expose the ordinariness of cruelty-the moment a teacher's smile hides predation, a bureaucrat's stamp erases a life, or a grandson's need curdles into murder. Beneath each crime lies a question that resists closure: Who is guilty when everyone looks away?

The Book of Shadows, the author's preface, frames the entire series as a "dialogue with time"-a resistance to forgetting. It declares that crime fiction, when grounded in real pain, becomes the final court of memory. For Chang Li Yen, suspense is not a riddle to be solved but a mirror forcing readers to meet their own reflection. "What I write," he confesses, "is not who killed whom, but how we kill ourselves."

Across more than four hundred pages, Volume VII continues the Taiwan Case Files of Suspicion saga's evolution from investigative realism to metaphysical indictment. The familiar themes of corrupted institutions, buried trauma, and moral entropy are refined here into a literary anatomy of an island's collective psyche. Ghost stories coexist with courtroom transcripts; folklore bleeds into forensic detail. Each page radiates a slow, terrible beauty-the poetry of evidence and decay.

At its core, this book asks a simple, devastating question: when justice fails, does the truth still have a voice? Chang answers by giving that voice to the silenced-the victims, the forgotten, the unnamed-so that their confessions, even whispered through fiction, may disturb our sleep.

Readers of Keigo Higashino, Shūsaku Endō, or Han Kang will find in Chang Li Yen a kindred craftsman who turns guilt into language and testimony into art. Taiwan Case Files - Volume VII is not merely a crime anthology; it is a moral darkroom where every reader becomes a witness, and every shadow develops into truth.