Mark Hodder

Sir Richard Francis Burton investigates a strange apparition called Spring Heeled Jack that has been assaulting young women around London.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

Natalie

I couldn't finish this. Hell, I couldn't get more than 60 pages into it. 

If you have enough imagination to create an alternate Victorian England with genetically engineered animals and steam-powered bicycles, you should have enough imagination to do something about the casual sexism, racism, and classism of the time as well. Or at least examine those issues instead of just accepting them. Feh.

I also bounced pretty hard off the writing style, but that's a personal preference--I generally prefer a less purple style of prose.

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! 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!

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

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