The Ghost Marriage Broker

About this book:

In 1980s Shanxi, Wang Zhiyuan navigates the shadowy border between the living and the dead as a *gui meiren*—a ghost marriage broker who arranges posthumous unions to secure ancestral peace. His trade relies on discretion, an extensive network of grave diggers, and an intuitive grasp of the spirits’ whispers. But when a freshly procured corpse bride vanishes from a sealed coffin on the eve of a lucrative ceremony, Zhiyuan’s reputation—and the spiritual fate of a grieving family—hangs by a thread. The theft bears no sign of demons, only the cold, calculated precision of a human hand.

As Zhiyuan tracks the missing body through the windswept Loess Plateau, he uncovers a festering rot beneath the village’s pious rituals. Old feuds dating back to the Cultural Revolution, buried family secrets, and forbidden desires surface with every exhumed grave and interrogated witness. From the midwife’s hushed confession to the butcher’s bloody ledger, the investigation reveals that Li Hua’s death was no accident, and her disappearance is merely the first act in a decades-long reckoning.

Blending atmospheric historical mystery with the chilling folklore of *minghun*, *The Ghost Marriage Broker* is a masterclass in tension. Follow Zhiyuan down a path where paper money burns for sins not yet confessed, and the price of silence is paid in blood. In a world where the dead hold the final deed to the land, some marriages are made in heaven—but others are forged in the dark.