I’ve been easing my way through the K.J. Charles books that I haven’t yet read, in an attempt to savor them, knowing I have more to look forward to. Over the last couple of weeks I started and finished the Will Darling Trilogy of Slippery Creatures (2020), The Sugared Game (2020) and Subtle Blood (2021).
Wow–I loved these so much! Charles writes such an engaging combination of anxiety-producing dangerous situations and thrilling spicy scenes, along with characters I would love to meet. This trilogy is set in the 1920s, just after the Great War where England lost so many men.
Will Darling is finally doing all right. While he was lucky enough to return from the War in one piece, it’s not been easy finding work, since the main thing he learned in the trenches was how to kill, and he was surprisingly good at it. After insistence by his good friend Maisy, a dark-skinned young woman who works in a millinery shop, who came from Wales, he got in touch with his only living relative, an uncle who owned an antiquarian book shop. His uncle died after an illness of a few weeks, and Will has inherited the shop.
One day a suspicious man comes to the shop, threatening him, looking for “the information”–but Will has no idea what he is talking about. Another man claiming to be from the war department also comes by looking for the same thing, and a handsome man named Lord Arthur Secretan also stops by for a chat. Will hits it off with Secretan, who goes by Kim to his friends. But he later hears that Secretan was a Bolshevik and a conscientious objector to the War, and not someone he should trust.
I read somewhere that Charles’s books are “romances with a body count” and that is definitely the case here. Slippery Creatures is filled with intrigue and spies and a shadowy organization called Zodiac, which is ready to murder and kidnap in order to get the information they believe that Will has. But England also has the Private Bureau, which Will finds out that Kim is actually working for. Though he and Kim have a strong sexual attraction, Kim is engaged to Phoebe, who shows up at Will’s shop to inexplicably give him permission to spend time with Kim!
At the end of Slippery Creatures, everyone is safe and accounted for, except for the bad guys Will has killed, of course, with the Private Bureau taking care of any pesky murder charges. At the beginning of The Sugared Game, Kim has disappeared for a while, and Will is grumpy. But not too grumpy to take Maisy out to a nightclub, where Will sees someone he served with, now in a much-reduced position as a waiter. When Kim reappears, Will is happy, but he can’t have Kim continuing to lie to him–which seems to be what Kim does best. Though Will is admittedly a killer, he’s mostly a straightforward one and he can’t abide lies. The Sugared Game involves more spies and schemes, and it seems they can’t get rid of Zodiac. Phoebe is miserable because her father would rather she entertain another suitor instead of Kim, and is making his investment in Maisy’s new fashion business subject to the approval of that suitor. When all four of them end up at Phoebe’s manor home, Will is out of his element since he is just a mere commoner, but he’s there to support Maisy and be Kim’s muscle.
Finally, in Subtle Blood it seems Will and Kim might be free of Zodiac. Kim has left the Private Bureau (not of his own choice) and he has been helping Will in the bookshop. They have learned how to be honest with each other, and the spicy scenes continue to be great, although they’ve not talked about the future–there is no map or model for how two men from such different classes as they are could be together. When Kim’s older brother and father’s heir is a murder suspect, Kim convinces Will that they have to find the actual murderer because Kim in no way wants to become the heir. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in his family or been to the manor house in years. But then Will is set up for a murder of a likely witness to his brother’s case, and the only place of safety for Will is Kim’s family estate, even though it’s the last place Kim could ever feel safe due to how his family has always treated him.
These are so, so good! I loved both Will and Kim, and Phoebe and Maisie as their best friends. Maisie is also described as quite a curvy, bosomy woman, so I will consider them weight neutral, with some fat positivity. Charles’s writing makes me feel like all will be right in the world, even if there are some bumps along the way. I loved the emotional growth in both Will and Kim from the beginning of the first book to the end of the last, and every spot in between. I kept looking for reasons to put in my earbuds so I could keep listening to more. So now the question is . . . which of her books to read next?
Reading While Fat 