Honor's Kingdom by Owen Parry

Winner of the Hammett Prize for crime writing book in 2002.

Winner of the 2002 Hammett Award They found the dead fellow in London, balled up in a basket of eels. Chewed upon he was, and most unsightly. He still had the proper shape of a man, if a bit whittled down and perforated. But he was not handsome on the butcher's table, even though the blood was long since out of him.

In a stunning re-creation of 1860s London and Glasgow that reaches from the worst slums in Europe to the lobbies of Parliament, Owen Parry brings the past to ravishing life. In a time when casualty lists grimly mount in America's Civil War, federal officer Major Abel Jones returns to the land he once left in hope of a better life on a mission essential to the Union cause. Yet it is the strange death of a lowly man of the cloth -- and a subsequent series of equally grotesque murders -- that intrude upon Jones's determined efforts to block the delivery of British warships to the Confederacy. And his pursuit of a monstrous killer is leading a patriot with a limp, Victorian morals, and a Welsh lilt into a hellish darkness...where some of England's most renowned personages and powerful political leaders -- including Benjamin Disraeli himself -- appear to have a great deal to hide.

This book is part of the "Abel Jones" series.
Here are some other books from this series: