Four for a Boy (John the Eunuch Mysteries)

Gang-plagued streets, politicians plotting each other's downfall, poverty and homelessness existing side-by-side with manifest wealth-no, this isn't modern day Washington D.C., but rather 6th-Century Constantinople. After a philanthropist is murdered in the city's Great Church, where he's gone too visit a controversial statue of Christ, John the Eunuch, Lord Chamberlin to Byzantine Emperor Justinian the First, is assigned to ferret out the killer and maybe also to act the role of a spy in a web of rivalries involving the current and future emperors.