When Lan comes home to Shanghai after ten years in Europe, to try and locate her biological parents, everyone who could help is evasive. Her only clue is cricket fighting-a millennium-old Chinese pastime turned gambling racket where the nouveaux riches meet the underworld by night. The deeper she digs into her own mystery, the more obscure and sinister it becomes. The truth takes her by surprise: the past is unspeakably worse than she thought-and now casts its shadow over the present.