Friday, April 28, 2017

The Dastardly Miss Lizzie - A Steampunk Gender-Flipped Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde


My Electric Empire series is a dark, edgy, steampunk, gender-flipped retelling of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, where Dr. Eliza Jekyll is a crime scene investigator in Victorian London, secretly addicted to her father's magic potion and in a love-hate relationship with her dark side, Lizzie Hyde.

It's a quasi-1860s steampunk England, where science is strictly regulated and magic is forbidden. Trouble is, no one really knows where magic ends and science begins. So anything strange or wonderful is fraught with danger – which makes life very difficult for Eliza Jekyll, who's trying to forge a respectable career as a police physician in a time when women doctors were a curiosity at best. And she's always afraid that Lizzie will burst out without warning.
The new book, The Dastardly Miss Lizzie, is book 3 in the trilogy. Someone is murdering famous scientists – and Eliza and Lizzie's father, Mr Hyde, is mixed up in it. Eliza is dealing with troubles in her love life – is her perfect fiancĂ© secretly a French spy? Does he even love her? What on earth will she wear to the wedding? – while fending off Lizzie, who has her own ideas about who she'd like to be her boyfriend, thanks very much.
So here we go with The Dastardly Miss Lizzie in haiku meter. With apologies to every real haiku ever written.



The Dastardly Miss Lizzie, haiku-style

Eliza Jekyll
Doctor with a dark secret
Lizzie Hyde inside

Crime scene scientist
Solves murders with steampunk tools
And her clockwork dog

Corpses, stains of blood
What is this strange residue?
Is the killer mad?

Corrupt rulers lie
Burn scientists for witchcraft
Safety is fiction

Their thugs spy and trick
Lucky: one is her boyfriend
Too good to be true?

Home is a refuge
But lonely, in need of friends
Who will understand?

Past folly haunts her
The mistake she can't undo
A madman escaped

Love letters in blood
His whisper warms her nightmares
A glittering blade

Drinks elixir – gulp!
And Lizzie pops out to play
Not always welcome

Dark city awaits
Sensations forbidden to
Respectable girls

Yearning for freedom
To laugh, exult, love – escape!
This cruel cage of flesh

Mr. Hyde, her dad
Roguish ruler of misfits
On his crooked throne

Murders escalate
Is Hyde guilty? We hope not
Fresh blood on his hands

No time for pity
Catch the killer or be next
And the world could end

The Dastardly Miss Lizzie
An Electric Empire Novel
Book Three
Viola Carr

On sale: 4/18/2017
ISBN: 9780062363121

In the third book in Viola Carr’s fantastically fun and wonderfully edgy Electric Empire novel, set in the gritty world of alternate Victorian London, Dr. Eliza Jekyll must team up with her secret other half, Miss Lizzie Hyde, as her world comes crashing to a halt when a madman begins targeting the city’s most important scientists, and sorcerers threaten all she holds dear.

About the Book:

Crime scene physician Eliza Jekyll is trying to share a life with her rebellious second self, Lizzie Hyde. But being two people in one body isn’t easy, not when Eliza has a professional reputation to protect and Lizzie is veering headfirst into a life of debauchery and crime with an increasingly demented Mr. Hyde. Not to mention the difficulty of making a respectable marriage with Remy Lafayette--Royal Society investigator and occasional lycanthrope--while Lizzie enjoys her own dubious romantic entanglements. And with England on the brink of war, Remy’s secretive mission in sorcery-riddled Paris grows ever more sinister. Has he been an enemy agent all along? Or is Eliza finally going mad?

Now, she’s confronted by her most baffling case yet: an evil genius with a penchant for theatrics is murdering eminent scientists in the most inexplicable ways. Her investigation uncovers a murky world of forbidden books, secret laboratories and bleeding-edge science punishable by death--and a shocking connection to her father’s infamous experiments. Desperate to learn the truth about her past, she must infiltrate a cabal of fanatical inventors bent on a discovery that will change the world--or destroy it.

With London under attack by sorcery-wielding terrorists, and the Royal Society’s enforcers determined to bury her evidence for good, Eliza needs all the friends she can get if she’s to thwart the killer and keep her head. But when Lizzie’s criminal shenanigans get Eliza fired from the Metropolitan Police, and Remy is implicated in an act of bloody vengeance he didn’t commit (or did he?), she’s on her own.

Except for wily, resourceful, mercurial Lizzie. But Lizzie’s got her own life now. And she’ll do anything to keep it. Even if it means attempting the unspeakable and finding her own body. Even if it means throwing Eliza to the wolves, and letting the world burn…

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About the Author:

Viola Carr was born in Australia, but wandered into darkest London one foggy October evening and never found her way out. She now devours countless history books and dictates fantastical novels by gaslight, accompanied by classical music and the snoring of her slumbering cat. She likes steampunk, and thought it would be cool to investigate wacky crimes with crazy gadgets…just so long as her heroine was the creator of said wacky gadgets: a tinkerer, edgy, with a dash of mad scientist.





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2 comments:

Rhi said...

ooo! I like this. Gorgeous covers too.

Peggy Lindsey said...

Love the cover cant wait to read the book I have it in my tbr pile .