The Lacquer Screen takes us back to the time when that brilliant detective was serving in his first post, as magistrate of Peng-lai in Shantung Province. One year after he had solved the mysterious Gold Murders there, the judge and his lieutenant Chiao Tai had to travel to the Prefecture. On the way back they broke their journey in the district of Weiping, and there the bearded judge was confronted with the three baffling cases related in this book - cases whose strangeness is unsurpassed by any he solved during the whole of his long career.
