'Tension and detail spot on' Daily Telegraph
Robert Louis Stevenson's strange and sinister tale of the gentle Dr Jekyll and the sadistic Mr Hyde is filled with oddities suggesting a dark reality behind a classic fiction. That dark reality is laid bare in the casebook of Inspector Swain.
The 'parliamentary murder' of 1884 leads the inspector and his portly sergeant, Lumley, from plush drawing-room to madhouse cell in search of the link between a coward in the red-coated ranks at Isandhlwana, a killer in Cheyne Walk and the satanic persona of Edward Hyde.
Donald Thomas is the author of seven biographies, including Cardigan of Balaclava and his best-selling life of Cochrane: Britannia's Sea Wolf. He is also a respected novelist, and has won the Gregory Award for his poems Points of Contact. He was born in Somerset, educated at Queen's College, Taunton and Balliol College, Oxford. He holds a personal chair at the University of Cardiff.