The Diabolical Miss Hyde (Electric Empire #1) by Viola Carr

The Diabolical Miss Hyde: An Electric Empire Novel (Electric Empire Novels) - Viola Carr

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.

 

 

Another major bonus of this story is Eliza and Captain Lafayette – member of the Royal Society, the police force that hunts down and burns unorthodox scientists and beings, like Eliza/Lizzie. Lizzie is interesting with Lafayette as well, but Eliza and Lafayette’s snarky back and forth is a joyous thing to read. Their banter, their battle of wits and her constant, expert put downs are truly glorious

 

One wishy-washy issue I have is hard to put into words – but the book felt long. I was reading it and enjoying it but I got to, say, the 300 page mark and had a sudden sense of “why is this book still going?” I wasn’t exactly fed up of the book, but it was beginning to stretch my attention span. I was enjoying it but I was starting to count down and very conscience of how much of the book is left. So, yes, I definitely had a sense that it needed cutting down a bit, it needed speeding up a bit, we needed to reach the conclusion a little faster than we actually did. In the end, it left me vaguely impatient with the ending rather than revelling in it

 

I think in part it was because this huge and wonderful world is just, perhaps, just a little too huge. Or, rather, there is far too much of that hugeness involved directly in Eliza’s story

 

So we have the Royal Society persecuting any deviation from orthodox science – which is a fascinating background world building thing. But then that pulls Eliza into it not just as a potential unorthodox practitioner but because the mysterious head of the Royal Society has Plans For Her.

 

We have the storyline of Eliza’s father (the original Jekyll/Hyde) and her benefactor and all the complexities involved

 

We have the storyline of Captain Lafayette and his deep dark secret and the nuance of his relationship with Eliza and Lizzie.

 

We have the Lizzie and all of her contacts with the underworld which are all kind of involved and complex and emotional scenes.

 

 

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Source: http://www.fangsforthefantasy.com/2015/02/the-diabolical-miss-hyde-electric.html