While countries from around the world display their gleaming new inventions in the Centennial, nearby is a labyrinth of festering streets called Shantyville, with its opium dens, criminals, and freak shows. Here, Wilton McCleary comes across the butchered body of a girl. As McCleary grapples with a killing his own police superiors want to ignore, he realizes that he had come face to face with the girl's killer, and that the young man is linked to the family of a powerful industrialist, his callow son, and his beautiful, high-strung daughter. Suddenly a murder investigation takes McCleary into a family's private madness and a web of blackmail and revenge that will force him to solve a series of unspeakable crimes---or commit one of his own. "Captured at Gettysburg, imprisoned in Andersonville, Wilton McCleary lost his innocence in the Civil War.But on the streets of Philadelphia he's found a home---as a grizzled city detective facing squalor and pathos