The Heartless City

Written by Andrea Berthot

Narrated by Antony Ferguson

Henry Jekyll was a brilliant doctor, a passionate idealist who aimed to free mankind of selfishness and vice. He's also the man who carelessly created a race of monsters.

Once shared secretly among the good doctor's inner circle, the Hyde drug was smuggled into mass-production-but in pill form, it corrupted its users at the genetic level, leaving them liable to transform without warning. A quarter of the population are now clandestine killers-ticking bombs that could detonate at any given moment.

It's 1903, and London has been quarantined for thirteen years.

Son of the city's most prominent physician and cure-seeker, seventeen-year-old Elliot Morrissey has had his own devastating brush with science, downing a potion meant to remove his human weaknesses and strengthen him against the Hydes-and finding instead he's become an empath, leveled by the emotions of a dying city.

He finds an unlikely ally in Iris Faye, a waitress at one of the city's rowdier music halls, whose emotions nearly blind him; her fearlessness is a beacon in a city rife with terror. Iris, however, is more than what she seems, and reveals a mission to bring down the establishment that has crippled the people of London.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Mar 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781541471542

Reviews for The Heartless City

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Free review copy; I was interested in the idea of retelling the Jekyll & Hyde story. London is quarantined as a result of the crisis brought about by Dr. Jeckyll’s invention, which has spread in tablet form to transform so many Londoners into monsters that the city has been shut off from the rest of the country. A privileged young man, experimenting with a serum to quell his feelings, instead turns himself into an empath, and then falls in love with a girl whose own unusual abilities might save them all—if they can only survive his father and the Lord Mayor. Wrapped up a bit too swiftly and neatly, but I liked the attempt to breathe new life into the Hyde mythology.