Dr. Eliza Jekyll is a doctor at Bethlem hospital – and a
crime scene investigator, helping the police investigate a series of disturbing
murders and mutilations that are stalking London
But Eliza has a secret – and a serum she is driven to
take which lets the much wilder Lizzie Hyde out to play; a character who is
much more in key with the dark underclass of London unlike the oh-so-proper
Eliza Jekyll. Eliza tries to keep her repressed – but Lizzie’s knowledge and
connections may be essential to the case.
This is a problem with Captain Lafayette, an enforcer for
the Royal Society, police of all things mystical and unorthodox joins the
investigation for reasons unknown. Her secret could end up with her burned at
the stake.
This book has a whole lot of awesome concepts that I
love. The world is excellent – a wonderful brass-and-electricity steampunk
world with all of that aesthetics, taking a well researched Victorian London
with both it’s very proper upstairs world and its gritty, grossly abused,
unequal underclass who strived underneath it. We have a deeply unequal world
and a deeply unjust one that explores the revolutions and responses to
revolution that were so common at that time that we don’t often see in
Steampunks (or, if we do, we have some nebulous “anarchists” or “insurrectionists”
without much exploration of their motivations).
With all this repression it’s also built into the
supernatural and super-science elements of the show itself; we have people of
fae descent with strangely different bodies who are repressed and driven into
the shadows by the ordered Royal Society. In this oppressive society, not only
are the mystical human beings driven out, but also the science/quasi science
itself is repressed. The sheer huge potential of Steampunk and Victorian Gothic
with its ether and technology and strange potions is obviously a threat to the
staid establishment and is heavily and viciously policed.
The protagonist is also an interesting twist: Dr. Eliza Jekyll and Miss Lizzie Hyde; with an extra twist on the whole “good and evil” dichotomy of the Jekyll/Hyde storyline. It’s not good and evil, it’s, if anything, order and chaos. Or maybe law & society vs underclass. Or even upper class vs underclass. Or, probably more accurately, they don’t really fit neatly in any of those categories. Lizzie is more ruthless but has often moral barriers and, in some ways, more compassion than Eliza does. Eliza, though, is easily subversive and rebellious in her own role as a female doctor, a police surgeon and a doctor in Bethlem Mental Hospital. There’s no simple black vs white this vs that line between the two which in turn makes their own storyline compelling as Eliza begins in repressing her “sister” but slowly opens to her more and more.
Along with all this we have an interesting murder mystery
– and it’s interesting to me because it’s almost woo-woo-less. Eliza doesn’t
have some arcane technology or special ability that makes her a super expert at
solving crimes. What she has is her credentials, her knowledge and her skill
which is interesting in and of itself though I’d quite like to have seen more of
it.
