The Darwin Affair by Tim Mason

A library book club recommendation.  We have a police detective in London who has unwittingly been labeled as being the model for Dicken’s Inspector Bucket in his serial novel, Bleak House.  It’s made him popular with a lot of people, even the Queen.  He is given the responsibility to make sure she is safe on her way across London.  But a witless man waves a gun and screams anarchist slogans.  He gets away but is slain only a block from the scene.  A butcher’s apprentice sees a man fleeing the scene, but doesn’t think much about it.  The next day he is abducted.  The detective tracks people with no real success and is eventually let go for insubordination.  He accepts a job at a pub that is next to a funeral home.  One that is switching bodies from the coffins to sell as cadavers to the medical school across the way.  But then our detective recognizes one of the bodies.  And the race is on.  He is reassigned into the police and set to accompany the Queen and Prince Albert on their visit to Germany.  And the original assassin, along with his new ‘apprentice’, the butcher boy, follow to try to kill the Prince.