2024 COVERS

2024 covers

Welcome to the Dark Side!

We are writers mainly from Australia and New Zealand who write speculative fiction with romantic elements. Be it fantasy, paranormal, dark urban fantasy, futuristic and everything in between.

Thursday 26 February 2015

Magic Thursday Steampunk with The Diabolical Miss Hyde ~ Viola Carr



New book, new publisher, new author name. Meet Viola Carr, author of The Diabolical Miss Hyde, an edgy, darkly romantic steampunk re-imagining of Jekyll & Hyde.

It's CSI: Dr Jekyll meets Frankenstein, splashed with Sweeney Todd's blood. Everything you never knew you wanted, right?

So why a pseudonym? 'Erica Hayes' is a perfectly good name, right? And Viola is me. She writes a bit like me. She sounds like me on Twitter. Funnily enough, she even looks a bit like me in her author pic.

But Miss Hyde is definitely Viola's book, bless her bent little heart. It's a new genre – steampunk murder mystery! – that I've never tried before. It's deeper, darker and more gleefully twisted than Erica's books - yes, if such a thing were possible. It's a Jekyll & Hyde thing… but which of us is the evil sister?

Is there paranormal goodness in this book? Absolutely. Monsters, wacky steampunk tech, a dash of alchemy and a luminous magical underworld. Is there romance? You bet. Eliza and Lizzie, my heroines… well, they're the same heroine, but… anyway, there's kind of a love triangle… well, a four-sided thingy… a love trapezoid? Anyway. All you need to know is: hot Victorian dudes in uniform… and a creepy, tragically romantic fellow with a little compulsive homicide problem…

Anyway. Viola's pleased to meet you.

(P.S. If anyone's coming to ARRC, I'll be there… I mean, we… whatever. We'll have chocolate roses.)


Book links – ebook only in Australia until May, when the paperback will be in stores. But hey, that's what the Book Depository's for :)







Cover copy:

Magic, mystery, and romance mix in this edgy steampunk fantasy retelling of the horror classic—in which Dr. Eliza Jekyll is the daughter of the infamous Dr. Henry Jekyll.

In an electric-powered Victorian London, Dr. Eliza Jekyll is a crime scene investigator, hunting killers with inventive new technological gadgets. Now, a new killer is splattering London in blood, drugging beautiful women and slicing off their limbs. Catching the Chopper will make Eliza’s career - or get her burned. Because Eliza has a dark secret. A seductive second self, set free by her father’s forbidden magical elixir: wild, impulsive Lizzie Hyde. 

When the Royal Society sends their Enforcer, the mercurial Captain Lafayette, to prove she’s a sorcerer, Eliza must resist the elixir with all her power. But as the Chopper case draws her into London’s luminous magical underworld, Eliza will need all the help she can get. Even if it means getting close to Lafayette, who harbors an evil curse of his own. 

Even if it means risking everything and setting vengeful Lizzie free …





1 comment:

  1. Love your new persona, Erica! Um Viola..sorry. See you both at ARRC!

    ReplyDelete

check out all our books on our dsdu-books shelf:
DarkSide DownUnder's book lists (dsdu-books shelf)