Burton and Swinburne in the Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

<p>It is 1861, and Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces.</p><p>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.</p><p>Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar and swordsman <i>Sir Richard Francis Burton</i> finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, <i>Lord Palmerston</i>, employs him as ''King''s Spy''.</p><p>His first mission: 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, <i>John Hanning Speke</i>.</p><p>Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, <i>Algernon Swinburne</i>, Burton''s investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn''t exist at all.</p>