Heritage: Spring-Heeled Jack

"People have gone missing in droves."

Writer: Gemma Arrowsmith

Format: Audio

Released: October 2019

Series: Paternoster Gang 2.03

Featuring: Vastra, Jenny, Strax

Synopsis

People are being stolen from the streets by a monster. By all accounts, it has burning eyes, breathes blue flames, and can leap the heigh of a building at a bound.

While Vastra and Jenny fend off an over-eager member of the gutter press, Strax dives into dangerous waters.

Is this Spring-Heeled Jack of legend, returned to terrorise the capital? Or are there more sinister forces at work?

Verdict

Spring-Heeled Jack was an outstanding story to conclude the second series of Heritage adventures for the Paternoster Gang! This was definitely the best story from the spinoff range so far and was just all three characters at their best and a brilliant Victorian setting and plot at the heart. I really had no complaints, this was everything I could ask for from the series. I liked the mystery of the start and that dark atmosphere was established very early on with the disappearance of Jimmy right in front of his partner Elizabeth. She was clearly distressed by the incident and went to the Paternoster Gang to enlist their help, and with Jenny's reaction to the titular perpetrator of the disappearance she had certainly come to the right place! I mentioned in my blog entry of The Screaming Ceiling that I hoped we would see Jenny come to the forefront for this finale and I was certainly not left disappointed. She was keen to investigate based on the supposed presence of Spring-Heeled Jack who was an intriguing figure of legend. Vastra was once again showing Doctor qualities in not believing that the actual legend could be the person or thing responsible for Jimmy's disappearance, and he was not the only one who had been lost in the last fortnight in London. The feel of the audio was really impressive and eery, so having bubbly journalist Gwendoline Platt arrive on the trail of a good story was a fun twist. She was a marvellous character and I adored how Jenny pretty much despised her publication because of the details it revealed about ongoing police investigations and crimes. Gwendoline failed to see the danger and was only in it for a story, so much so that she barely registered the fact that Elizabeth was also taken by Jack right in front of her! Talk about being consumed by your work, that really didn't go down well with Jenny. I thought Strax had another glorious outing and the humour that came from him ending up with a solution to clogged chimneys when going off to investigate the large footprints on top of buildings was brilliant. He loved the sound of Jack as a potential something to engage in combat and his comments about Jenny being neither captured nor dead when she was used as bait were just terrific. I thought the truth about Jack being a Tomanu was a nice logical explanation to events, and the species were actually one involved in saving. Jimmy had been in league with the creature all along which was a good surprise. The fact that the potential victims were people close to death was a fantastic concept, so not only did he remove them from dying, but Jack removed them from time altogether! That was nicely done and the way it was incorporated into the Paternoster Gang themselves with Gwendoline being the next victim intended was great, and she was indeed soon forgotten as Vastra and Jenny reminisced of that journalist reporter and this case. Overall, a simply brilliant audio adventure to conclude the boxset! 

Rating: 10/10