Publisher's Synopsis
London 1881: the capital of a mighty empire at its zenith and a flourishing hub of world trade, but also a city of vast disparities in wealth and social class. It is a city in which William Barrington, a wealthy ex-China trader, dockland baron and slum landlord, can rub shoulders with Henry Craig, a destitute alcoholic, Joseph McEvoy, a violent drunk living in one of Barrington's slums, and Alice, McEvoy's beautiful daughter, and a maid in Barrington's mansion. A mutilated body found floating in the Thames is the first in a series of brutal murders occurring in the dockland area of Limehouse, bringing together the unlikely Scotland Yard pairing of private-educated Inspector Everett Parsons and Harris, the working class sergeant from the East End backstreets. Their investigation leads them from the fashionable world of Ladbroke Square mansions and exclusive Pall Mall clubs to the squalid slums of Limehouse; where they encounter Edmund, Barrington's pleasure-seeking son, Sun Lijuan, an alluring Chinese cocubine, Gabriel Tolchard, a disillusioned missionary from China running a soup kitchen for the homeless, George Watson, Barrington's bullying foreman, and Biao Feng, the sadistic leader of a Chinese secret society. Against the fascinating background of the history of the British Empire, Peter Tyzack - as in his first novel "Rooted in Dishonor" - addresses the moral issues facing Victorian England by creating a complex and dramatic plot with a rich kaleidoscope of characters.
