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!
They stand at a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the
epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces: engineers transform
the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological
wonders; eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor;
libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty
and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to
the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy.
The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and
ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate
assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring
Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's
East End. 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!