Inspector Swain – serie

In the slum alleys of Lambeth in 1891 a sinister silk-hatted figure lurks in the shadows - but trade is there for the taking and a girl must make a living. Now, one after another, the girls who work the Waterloo Road wake in the morning to feel the slow agony of the most vicious of poisons ...victims of the man called Fred. The police have only a string of 'catch me if you can' letters to taunt them, whilea whole mailing list of Victorian worthies find demands for money with menaces in their mail. Inspector Swain investigates ...'Original story told in a highly individual manner' Times Literary Supplement

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.