When a string of spontaneous human combustions roils Taipei, a child prodigy joins forces with police to crack the case. Applying the logic of the game of go, this youthful detective penetrates the confusing and contradictory web of clues to uncover a devious stratagem behind the deaths.

Taipei. Midsummer. Three events of spontaneous human combustion are linked by a mysterious phrase branded into the chests of the charred bodies: “The Buddha is gone. The world burns.” Running out of leads, police detectives turn to the child prodigy who helped them on a previous thorny case in hopes of catching a serial killer.


With a Wechsler IQ score of 145, child detective Tung Chi-Chieh is the youngest person of Asian descent to ever serve on the board of Mensa International. He has passions for logical deduction and criminal psychology, and has developed a “peerless” methodology of crime detection based on the principles of the strategy game go. As the investigation deepens, Chi-Chieh and the police detectives uncover disturbing events obscured by the immolations: acts of child sexual abuse linked to a prominent family, and a deadly vendetta that has lain dormant for decades. Clearly, some of Taipei’s rich and famous have dark secrets they are loathe to reveal.


Bodacious! Three Realms takes a passage from the Lotus Sutra as its central theme: “the world burns as a house on fire”. This Buddhist text describes the human condition of being so absorbed in the pursuit of our desires that we are oblivious to the danger of our predicament, like people asleep in a burning house. In this tense crime thriller, the famous passage becomes a commentary on creeping moral decay – when we unwittingly play with fire, the fire will eventually consume us. Casting its gaze over an oppressive society and the dark shadows cast by childhood trauma, Bodacious! Three Realms transcends its genre roots, delivering penetrating depth and top-notch entertainment in a feat that has earned the praise of Martin Edwards and other luminaries of international crime fiction.