Slippery Creatures (The Will Darling Adventures #1)


Title:
Slippery Creatures (The Will Darling Adventures #1) 
Author: KJ Charles 
Publisher: KJC Books 
Release Date: May 13, 2020 
Genre(s): Historical M/M Murder / Suspense 
Page Count: 265 
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 


Oh, dear. I haven't stayed up most of the night reading a book for a long time .... except for last night when I picked up this book (after reading just a few chapters earlier and setting it down for some now-I-realize totally insane reason) and devoured it until 4:30 a.m.

Set in post WWI England, Will Darling is a soldier with a box ful of metals and little money. After scraping far too close to the dredges of society, he is unexpectedly saved by inheriting a dusty second-hand bookstore. Except there is a secret hidden somewhere in the stacks, and a nefarious criminal group, as well as the Home Office and any number of tangential characters determined to find it and who aren't particularly interested in playing nice with Will. 

And then there's Kit ... the second son of a Lord, with a penance for purple velvet dressing gowns, champagne and the finer skills of killing a man with a knife as well as scaling walls dressed to the nines in evening wear. Kit is a great character and KJ Charles slowly unpeels him enough to give us a glimpse into his mind, but leaves a shed-load more to unearth. 

There is also a heaping shed-load of sexual tension between Will and Kit (and more than a few wonderfully detailed sex scenes), and the author does a stellar job of sketching out the limits and dangers for men of a certain ilk in the 1920's. Kit's fiance, Phoebe, is delightfully open-minded, and the book ends with a HFN situation for the two men, but there is so much more to explore in this series and I.Can.Not.Wait. 

My only complaint about the book was that Will flies to conclusions immediately as to Kit's motives (and I can't say that he's not wrong .....) but after the third iteration, I grew a bit ...weary of the same theme. But in the grand scheme of things, and at the beginning of what looks to be a simply grand series, I'm okay - I'll live. 4.5 stars for Slippery Creatures

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