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Aug. 18th, 2021 06:52 pmI am sadly no longer in a small lakeside cottage, nor devouring a paperback a day, but it seems a good transition back into my long tail of overdue booklogs might be talking about K.J. Charles' Will Darling Adventures trilogy (Slippery Creatures, The Sugared Game, Subtle Blood), which I read on my last-to-this vacation and enjoyed very much as vacation reads precisely because they hearken back to and do in fact have a lot of the salient characteristics of yellowing vacation paperback thrillers.
The trilogy focuses on the partnership between working-class WWI vet Will Darling and angsty upper-class conscientious-objector-turned-secret-agent Kim Secretan as they attempt to identify and thwart the various members of a mysterious criminal organization known as the Zodiac, often while attending a 1920s house party or flapper club. It's very much an homage to 1920s/30s pulp fiction, in much the same way that Charles' Sins of the Cities novel is an homage to Victorian sensational fiction, and it's probably not a coincidence that I like these two trilogy-sets about the best of any of her stuff that I've read -- the combination of affectionately high-octane plotting with multi-book arcs allows her the opportunity and space to explore unusual character dynamics while still keeping the books moving along in a way that is fast and tropey and fun.
While the Sins of the Cities trilogy did stick to the standard formula of focusing on one romantic pairing per book, the Will Darling trilogy focuses on the development of Will and Kim's romance all through -- each book leaves them by the end in a relatively good place for where they're at and introduces new complications in the next one as they get to know each other better and get more entangled in each other's lives. I really enjoyed this structure; it's so nice to get a chance to get past the "I just met you and this is crazy" phase and dig into some storytelling about semi-established relationships, and romance novels just by standard convention do not get to do this very much!
As is often the case with Charles, there are B-plot lesbians, and they are delightful and charming and More Sensible Emotionally And Practically Than The Men and do not get any of the meaty interpersonal conflicts with each other that the male leads do. Someday perhaps Charles will finally getting around to writing a lesbian romance with teeth but this is not that day. (I certainly enjoyed reading Proper English but one couldn't really say it has teeth.)
The trilogy focuses on the partnership between working-class WWI vet Will Darling and angsty upper-class conscientious-objector-turned-secret-agent Kim Secretan as they attempt to identify and thwart the various members of a mysterious criminal organization known as the Zodiac, often while attending a 1920s house party or flapper club. It's very much an homage to 1920s/30s pulp fiction, in much the same way that Charles' Sins of the Cities novel is an homage to Victorian sensational fiction, and it's probably not a coincidence that I like these two trilogy-sets about the best of any of her stuff that I've read -- the combination of affectionately high-octane plotting with multi-book arcs allows her the opportunity and space to explore unusual character dynamics while still keeping the books moving along in a way that is fast and tropey and fun.
While the Sins of the Cities trilogy did stick to the standard formula of focusing on one romantic pairing per book, the Will Darling trilogy focuses on the development of Will and Kim's romance all through -- each book leaves them by the end in a relatively good place for where they're at and introduces new complications in the next one as they get to know each other better and get more entangled in each other's lives. I really enjoyed this structure; it's so nice to get a chance to get past the "I just met you and this is crazy" phase and dig into some storytelling about semi-established relationships, and romance novels just by standard convention do not get to do this very much!
As is often the case with Charles, there are B-plot lesbians, and they are delightful and charming and More Sensible Emotionally And Practically Than The Men and do not get any of the meaty interpersonal conflicts with each other that the male leads do. Someday perhaps Charles will finally getting around to writing a lesbian romance with teeth but this is not that day. (I certainly enjoyed reading Proper English but one couldn't really say it has teeth.)