The Dead Can’t Make a Living by Ed Lin

Cover of The Dead Can't Make a Living shows a comic-style noodle bowl that has features of a skull against a bright yellow background.Soho
Published April 7, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Jing-nan owns a popular stall at the Shilin Night Market, a vast food court in Taipei, Taiwan, where he and his small staff serve popular skewer sticks and other delicacies. He’s an energetic salesman, posting regularly to social media and enticing tourists to try his wares. He’s also (by the fifth volume in this series) notorious for getting involved in crimes that land him in the news. This time, he stumbles across a dead body as he takes out the trash. The victim is a Filipino migrant who works at a local food factory staffed largely by foreign workers brought to Taiwan to fill gaps in the labor market. When the man’s grieving family stops by, wanting his death investigated, Jing-nan feels for them, and his uncle Big Eye, a local gangster, encourages him to go undercover at the factory to discover what is going on there that might have led to the man’s death.

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