Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the creation long ago of Robert Louis Stevenson, has been a rich trope in fiction in all forms from print and graphic novels to television series and movies alike. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first made into a film with a database search showing forty productions in the following century. My favorite usage is the one by Simon R. Green that shows up in both his Nightside and Secret History series in which Jacqueline Hyde is two beings consisting of Jacqueline (the woman) who is in love with Hyde (the man) who only meet for brief seconds when one becomes the other.
The relationship here is similar but Eliza Hyde is the one in control, a lady forensic scientist and alienist in an England where the Royal Society are witch-hunters that seek out any who doesn’t follow the accepted orthodoxy that science is everything and that any thoughts of alchemy and the like are grounds for burning. Literally. Add in a repressive police force that arrests and jails at will which makes a seething but ultimately docile population.
Set I think in the late 1880s as Hyde helped capture Ripper Jack (who killed seventeen women in this alternate London) and generations ahead technologically of our in a way any reader even slightly familiar with the steampunk trope will recognize — strange weapons, stranger clockwork beings, and decidedly strange manners of dress and such. A Cavalry Officer is described as ‘ His hair was flaming orange, his eyes dazzling azure. He wore a glaring purple tailcoat with flashing epaulets.’ Hmmmm…
The writing style here is very similar to Kate Griffin’s Midnight Mayor series — long detailed descriptions of people and things like this: ‘Yells and drunken laughter chime through the night. All kinds of accents; Irishmen, to be sure—it’s where the name Holy Land came from—and these days they can hang your sorry carcass for an Ave Maria but it still ain’t no crime to be Irish. Scots accents, too, Welshmen and Geordies and guttural Rom, Chinamen and Turks and the dense dialects of navvies and coal diggers.’
Here we have not a male and a female as in the Jacqueline Hyde character but two women — one restrained and respectable (mostly), the other anything but. The latter considers herself a sister to Eliza, she calls herself Lizzie, and also considers herself an avenging spirit. A very lusty, hard drinking bloodthirsty avenging angel.
Eliza no the justice system in this London is a corrupt affair with ‘justice’ meted out only to those who cannot buy their freedom. After Eliza testifies at the trial of a child molester who has bought the judge and jury off, she takes the Hyde alchemical formal and transforms into Lizzie. She then tracks him down and brutally kills him.
Without spoiling anything further, I can tell that a new serial killer is lose in London,k one nicknamed The Chopper so called by the the press as he chops the limbs off his female vi times.
Will Eliza’s dark side be discovered! Will she fall for the dashing inquisitor for Royal Society, Captain Lafayette? Part steampunk romp, part murder mystery, and part sheer fantasy as the Hyde elixir is clearly alchemy, it’s a tasty romp that sets itself up nicely for the next book in what is called the Electric Empire series. Highly recommended!
(Tor, 2015)
