JEKYLL & HYDE

Major launches a new series featuring the world’s most intimately connected detective duo.

The starring role, however, goes to Muriel Carew, the former fiancee of Dr. Henry Jekyll, who suspects charitable fundraiser Simeon Courtenay of major fraud. That’s why she’s on the scene at Anderlins, Courtenay’s palatial home, at a reception where she discovers the body of barrister Benjamin Hardy, his body slashed and his throat cut. Her meetings with Jekyll, whom she runs into at Anderlins after a separation of 10 years, disclose other important information. Hardy is only one of a group of missing persons whom Jekyll, under the operating name Hyll Investigations, has been engaged to search for. Every one of those people has been photographed, quite a rare distinction in Victorian London. The photographs, as Muriel’s friend Phillip Fitzmaurice informs her, have all been taken in the same studio, presumably by the same photographer. And Muriel, who slips into the thankless role of Jekyll’s assistant, learns something she’d never realized before: Edward Hyde is Jekyll’s alter ego, a personality he changes into more or less involuntarily every couple of nights. As in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, the solution to the mystery is even more horrifying than the mystery itself. Major does such an admirable job with the heaviest lift here—coming up with a case that fully engages Jekyll/Hyde’s double nature without being overwhelmed by it—that it’s hard to imagine how he’ll manage it again. But expectations are high.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy—both of you.