This is an amazing book. It's an excellent old-fashioned British country house murder mystery, an alternative history, and political commentary all rolled into one. The political aspect sends chills down your spine in the days of the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and "indefinite detention", but it's not a polemic with cardboard characters. The mystery is a tense page-turner, and you care about the characters.

This story is set in England in 1949, in an alternate history where the government brokered a peace with Germany, and Britain's Fascist party is in the ascendent. The country house party is at the estate of a political family that strongly supports the government. The daughter of the family married a Jewish man before that went from a social faux pas to very, very unwise (the legal strictures against Jews on the continent been haven't copied in the U.K., yet). The two of them are guests that weekend, and when a prominent politician is murdered, the convenient Jew is the prime suspect. It's got hair-raising suspense as Scotland Yard investigates.

This is a completely satisfying stand-alone book, but there are two more books that follow Inspector Peter Carmichael over the years as he struggles to survive and live ethically in a society with a vicious government. I snatched up each of the books as they came out. The 3 books are called the Small Change trilogy: Farthing, Ha'penny, Half a Crown.