The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

by Mark Hodder

Book Overview

London, 1861. Sir Richard Francis Burton - explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne - unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade, for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin They stand at a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces: Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor; Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy. The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End. Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1616142405
• ISBN13: 9781616142407
• Release Date: September 2010
• Publisher: Pyr
• Length: 373 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The whole series is excellent historical fiction!

I'm not sure how anyone could give this a bad review, but there's no accounting for taste I guess! All the books in the series are wonderful & can appeal to ppl who enjoy a variety of different genres. I've never been in to Steampunk but this has touches of that- what I really loved was the historical characters. Just check it out & decide for yourself. If you can't get in to it, then the rest of the series isn't for you!

How did this get published?

This is simply badly written. Do not waste your money. An example, you ask? Bad dialogue, bad descriptions, and unbelievable situations. Not fantastic situations, I like those, but I’m expected to believe that a man with a javelin THROUGH HIS FACE, can use sign language and write words in the dirt? No. This book is ludicrous.