Аннотация
London, 1861. Sir Richard Francis Burton—explorer, linguist,scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career intatters; his former partner missing and probably dead. AlgernonCharles Swinburne—unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade; forwhom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin! They stand at acrossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of anempire torn by conflicting forces: Engineers transform thelandscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technologicalwonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaidlabor; Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society basedon beauty and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries ofhuman behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy. Thetwo men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral andethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton toinvestigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparitionknown as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves areterrorizing London's East End. Their investigations lead them toone of the defining events of the age, and the terrifyingpossibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all!
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