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Slippery Creatures (Will Darling Adventures, 1)
By K.J. Charles
KJC Books, 2020
Five stars

I’ve been dying to read this ever since I popped it onto my massive backlog. So I treated myself, and it was worth the wait.

This isn’t quite a romance, but it’s about love in a difficult time. However, it’s about a whole lot more, and written with K.J. Charles’s inimitable, elegant, carefully-crafted prose. She really gets the tone of the time down well, including the physical settings and the atmosphere. I think that Will Darling—not at all the person his name suggests—and Kim Secretan are beautifully rendered, and their two supporting actresses, as it were, Maisie and Phoebe, are as interesting and vivid as you could want.

Will is a survivor of the Great War, and the role he plays in that war is a direct link to his personality and his worldview. There is no romanticizing of WWI, which one character refers to as a “dispute between cousins” that killed millions of young men to no real purpose. Abandoned by his country after the war, with no family and no job, Will is reduced to having to pawn his medals. He reaches out to a long-estranged uncle and finds himself the heir to a bookshop in a quiet side street near Charing Cross. He also finds himself heir to a puzzling cloak-and-dagger plot that quickly becomes ugly.

Enter Kim Secretan, suave, handsome and upper-crust. He and Will form a tentative alliance, fueled by mutual attraction, as both hostile officials from the War Office and a mysterious gang of tattooed thugs begin to harass Will. What becomes evident all too soon is that Will’s dislike of being pushed around applies to the government as much as it applies to the supposed bad guys. With nobody willing to tell him the truth, and his trust in Kim’s candor wavering with each new twist, Will decides he has to insist on his right as a British citizen to act on his own behalf.

Maisie is a smart, stylish shop girl, and Will’s best friend. Phoebe, on the other hand, is Kim’s fiancée, a beautiful aristocrat with the uncanny ability to make anyone feel comfortable. The British caste system is very much at play here, but the book’s four central characters are not remotely stereotypes. These are fully-fleshed-out young men and women, poised at a time in history when social barriers were crumbling. Each of them is a bit of an outsider, even within the roles assigned to them by God and Country; and that difference is what gives each of them the potential to be more, better. That potential carries them through the harrowing plot of this first book, and makes us want to follow them into the future volumes in this series.

Will and Kim are not easy, although I loved Will almost immediately. Their relationship is no less complicated than the author’s storyline, and while the author doesn’t give us any sort of a pat happy ending, we see potential for something…more.