The County Magistrate's Kitchen Cracks the Case

The Lin'an County Magistrate's office owed Lu Qing three hundred taels for meals, which eventually drove his restaurant out of business. With the county office unable to repay the debt, Lu Qing simply brought two pots and moved into the backyard, converting the abandoned kitchen into a canteen: constables had to pay for their meals, the magistrate had to wash dishes for his debts, and commoners could also get a hot meal when they came to handle affairs. But on the very first day the canteen opened, the county seal went missing. A piece of dough stained with cinnabar and an extra oil cake led Lu Qing to recover the seal and uncover a decade-old ledger. From then on, diseased pork, counterfeit salt, ghost granaries, and dead people's household registrations—one strange case after another came knocking. Lu Qing couldn't perform autopsies and knew nothing of criminal law, but he knew where grain came from, who had tampered with the food, and that a hungry person finds it hard to tell a lie convincingly. Lu Qing: "Sit down and eat first. After you finish, tell me whether you killed someone." — Description from novelcodex.org