The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
By Mark Hodder
2010
First Published
3.70
Average Rating
480
Number of Pages
Part of Series
It is 1861, and Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty and creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic, sexuality, drugs and anarchy. Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar and swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, employs him as “King's Spy.” His first to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man, half-dog creatures; and to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured former friend, John Hanning Speke.Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, Algernon Swinburne, Burton's investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn't exist at all.
Avg Rating
3.70
Number of Ratings
7,336
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
3%
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Author
Mark Hodder
Author · 16 books
British writer living in Valencia, Spain. Becoming the father of twins really slowed my writing down for three years. However, I'm happy to report that it's now returning to its former pace ... high time I got something new into the bookshops. I'm currently working on the final edit of a new SF novel which is the first in what I hope will be a massive new series. To find out more about it, read a pre-release version, access loads of extra material—including deleted scenes and writing tips & tricks—and to involve yourself in my creative process, please head over to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/MarkHodder
