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The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (Doomsday books 1)
By K.J. Charles
Sourcebooks, 2021
Five stars

The bonus pleasure in reading one of K.J. Charles’s “regency” romances is that you always learn something. Charles is a very good writer, and captures the feel of period language and manners as skillfully as anyone since Georgette Heyer (Heyer, but gayer!). She manages the prejudices and legal dangers of British reality in the early 1800s very neatly, without letting it bog down either her stories or her readers’ enjoyment of her fictional world. At the same time, she always engages with class and/or race differences in ways that are very much in tune with today, without feeling forced or false.

A young London lawyer meets up at a dim, hidden tavern with a longhaired working man known to the lawyer only as “Kent.” To Kent, he is “London.” They have had a lovely week together, meeting at night and enjoyed each other to the full. Then it all falls apart—for reasons that are frustrating but entirely expected. The lawyer, Gareth, expects that he’ll never see his Kent again, which sort of breaks his heart. Already at this moment we see Gareth for all his weaknesses—timid, snobbish, mistrustful, lonely; but we also see that he is special in the eyes of the mysterious Kentish workman.

And then Gareth receives a letter, announcing that his father—whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years—is dead, and he is now Sir Gareth Inglis, Baronet, with all the property, money, and privilege attached to the title.

Where we (and the new baronet) find ourselves for the rest of the book is in Romney Marsh, the vast waterlogged flatland along the Kentish coast, in which Gareth’s estate (and childhood home) is situated. The author immediately makes it sound as bleak and unappealing as possible—and then proceeds to make us fall in love with the place and its inhabitants (animal and human). We begin to see Romney Marsh in a new way as Gareth desperately tries to make sense of his fate and his abandonment by his father at six years old.

Needless to say, Sir Gareth Inglis soon runs a cropper of the Doomsday clan, a family of coastal smugglers as ancient as the Inglis baronetcy itself. At the head of the clan, under the iron hand of the matriarch Sybil Doomsday, is Josiah, known as Joss. Of course, Joss Doomsday is Kent, Gareth’s anonymous paramour from the tavern in London.

This is the stuff of romance, and K.J. Charles handles it so very well, even if we are half expecting it. Joss and Gareth are opposites, physically and culturally, and yet we know for a fact that they are good, and somehow, they are each other’s destiny. That’s the mindset of a romance enthusiast, and the task of the romance writer is to make it so without seeming trite or dull or over-obvious.

The characters in this book are as rich as Dickens (and I’ve read all of Dickens), and the plot is complex and fascinating and plausible given the time and place. It is also full of humor. Because it is a modern m/m romance, there’s plenty of intimate shenanigans; but I’m in that minority who doesn’t care about that. It’s everything else that makes me love this book—and Charles’s books in general.

There are more books in this Doomsday series, and I’d bet that they’re all as good as this one.