Jack the Ripper
Jekyll and Hyde
Time for confession, The Jekyll Revelation is outside the usual genre posted on Murder in Common. It’s not crime fiction, but as I enjoyed it so much, I decided to tell you about it anyway.
Based on a story about Robert Louis Stephenson and his book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Masello carefully interweaves two story lines beginning in 1881 and present day.
Stevenson is ill and often bedridden, as a result checks himself into a Swiss clinic. Among other stringent treatments he’s given an elixir. One evening, he crosses path with a grey wolf and this evolves into a deadly encounter with a clinic employee. Back in London, a play based on the Jekyll and Hyde book opens at the same time that Jack the Ripper begins his deadly work.
Today, Environmental Sciences field officer Rafael Salazar monitors the environment of coyotes in Topanga Canyon, California. The pawprints of a wolf in their territory puzzles him. Wolves and coyotes never share territory. Upon finding a handwritten journal in a trunk washed ashore, Rafe begins reading the words written by Stevenson in the 1800s.
Both storylines are equally engaging and well paced, and kept me from my crime fiction reading. I’m placing the blame firmly with Masello.
~ June Lorraine
4 responses to “Robert Masello: The Jekyll Revelation”
Now this sounds intriguing.
It’s a good book 🙂
It sounds like a good one. Stevenson was so ill for much of his life and also once recuperated at Saranac Lake. I’m fond of John Singer Sargent’s paintings of him, languid and attenuated. All that and creating such vigorous characters, living on in fiction today!
The painting of Stevenson’s marriage is quite interesting. It poses many questions for me 🙂