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The Will Darling Adventures
Dec. 8th, 2022 03:18 pmWell, I finished reading a book. Break out the champagne.
In fact, not just a book, but a gosh darn trilogy.
Now, I have to remind myself of this fact, but I used to read books all the time. I think I averaged about 12 a month. It was kind of 2/3 of my personality. I still (embarrassingly) have a pin prominently displayed on my jacket that says 'Meet me at the Bookshop' (although, tbh, I was always more a library girl than a bookshop one. I even worked in a library for a while, but never managed to swing a bookshop gig. Probably for the best.)
Anyhow, a few years ago I discovered CQL and then AO3, and well, now I would be lucky to make half a dozen a year. Anyhow.
The Will Darling trilogy by KJ Charles (Slippery Creatures, The Sugared Game, Subtle Blood) is a jolly good read, and I highly recommend it. Set very specifically in the 1920s it follows a British demobbed soldier who made it through a number of lean years to then connect with an estranged uncle who died, leaving him a going concern in the shape of a second hand bookshop. Darling is a little in over his head, but in a good way, until a parade of characters appear demanding some papers that an acquaintance of his uncle's apparently left with him for safe keeping. When a charming stranger steps in to help Will with the latest oaf busting up his shop, Will is exceedingly grateful: right up until the suave and darkly attractive Kim Secretan turns out to be both a disgraced Lord and possibly a bolshevik, and also the person who paid the oaf in question to make a disturbance so as to allow him to strike up an acquaintance with Will.
From then on it's pretty much non-stop action both with Will facing off against shady establishment figures AND an international cabal of troublemakers, and with the blazing sexual chemistry and growing romantic attachment to Kim. In the second book we get drug and nightclub shenanigans, and in the third a clubland murder which threatens to see Secretan inherit his father's title, very much a fate worse than death as far as our boys are concerned.
The details of setting and vocabulary really drag you in to a distant time and place, and the balance the author has struck between a full blown romance and an adventure story which is gripping in its own right both recommend this as a jolly good read.
In fact, not just a book, but a gosh darn trilogy.
Now, I have to remind myself of this fact, but I used to read books all the time. I think I averaged about 12 a month. It was kind of 2/3 of my personality. I still (embarrassingly) have a pin prominently displayed on my jacket that says 'Meet me at the Bookshop' (although, tbh, I was always more a library girl than a bookshop one. I even worked in a library for a while, but never managed to swing a bookshop gig. Probably for the best.)
Anyhow, a few years ago I discovered CQL and then AO3, and well, now I would be lucky to make half a dozen a year. Anyhow.
The Will Darling trilogy by KJ Charles (Slippery Creatures, The Sugared Game, Subtle Blood) is a jolly good read, and I highly recommend it. Set very specifically in the 1920s it follows a British demobbed soldier who made it through a number of lean years to then connect with an estranged uncle who died, leaving him a going concern in the shape of a second hand bookshop. Darling is a little in over his head, but in a good way, until a parade of characters appear demanding some papers that an acquaintance of his uncle's apparently left with him for safe keeping. When a charming stranger steps in to help Will with the latest oaf busting up his shop, Will is exceedingly grateful: right up until the suave and darkly attractive Kim Secretan turns out to be both a disgraced Lord and possibly a bolshevik, and also the person who paid the oaf in question to make a disturbance so as to allow him to strike up an acquaintance with Will.
From then on it's pretty much non-stop action both with Will facing off against shady establishment figures AND an international cabal of troublemakers, and with the blazing sexual chemistry and growing romantic attachment to Kim. In the second book we get drug and nightclub shenanigans, and in the third a clubland murder which threatens to see Secretan inherit his father's title, very much a fate worse than death as far as our boys are concerned.
The details of setting and vocabulary really drag you in to a distant time and place, and the balance the author has struck between a full blown romance and an adventure story which is gripping in its own right both recommend this as a jolly good read.
