After nine college students are trapped under a collapsed building for 14 days, only six come out alive, and only four of them can speak. The dead bodies of their fellow students are viciously mangled, leading police to investigate the case as a possible homicide. Detective Lieutenants Jeongdo Kwon and Yeongchae Shin, together with renowned neuropsychiatrist Dr. Yeongwha Ju, must parse through witness testimony and inconclusive physical evidence to uncover the truth. But how do you solve a locked-room murder case when every witness is a suspect?
Chasing Tails contains examples of the following tropes:
- Darkness Equals Death: The basement that the college students are in is in total darkness. This adds to the overall difficulty of finding out who killed who. The killer took advantage of the pitch black darkness to imitate voices of his fellow victims to mask his identity and isolate the victims by making them distrust each others.
- Everyone Is a Suspect: Each of the testifying survivors is suspicious in some way.
- Symbolic Cast Fadeout: Each chapter ends with nine pictures, representing 9 victims who were trapped in the wreckage. As the series go on, their face, name, age and survival status is revealed, with the victims who died in the wreckage being grayed out. In the final nine chapters of the series, each pictures of the victim is removed from the end of the chapter.
