On August 31st, 1888, just as the stage play of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was taking London by storm, the most notorious serial killer in history struck for the first time.

Jack the Ripper.

The grim coincidence did not escape the notice of the police, or the public, and in the hysteria that followed – the Ripper’s rampage continued for the run of the play – suspicion fell on everyone from the star who so convincingly portrayed the savage Mr. Hyde, to the author of the original story, Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Who but the creator of such incarnate evil, it was argued, could have given birth to such an actual monster?

But what if he had?

In THE JEKYLL REVELATION, history and mystery meet in a story as provocative as it is chilling. Spanning centuries and continents, from the darkened doorways of nineteenth-century London to the arid mountains surrounding present-day Los Angeles, THE JEKYLL REVELATION culminates in a terrifying discovery that solves at once an age-old puzzle and a contemporary crime.

The coincidence of the opening of a stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the first Jack the Ripper murder provides an intriguing starting point for Masello’s engaging thriller. In 1894 on the island of Samoa, where Stevenson has moved for his health, the writer learns that a native woman has been butchered in the same way as the Ripper’s victims. Stevenson fears that the nightmare he thought had ended in Whitechapel has come halfway across the world “to resume its dreadful enterprise.” The focus shifts to an environmental scientist in present-day California, then back to Stevenson’s creation of his legendary personification of human evil in the late 19th century. The relevance of the present-day action isn’t immediately clear, but readers’ patience will be rewarded.