Slippery Creatures

Slippery Creatures (2020) K.J. Charles (The Will Darling Adventures)

Will Darling returned from the Great War at a bit of a loss.

Will had gone to the War at eighteen, and come back five years later to find himself useless and unwanted. In Flanders he’d been a grizzled veteran, a fount of professional expertise who knew the ropes and had seen it all. Back in Blighty he’d become a young man again, one with little training and no experience. He’d been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

His one piece of luck was reaching out to his uncle, a dealer in antiquities, who took Will on in his shop. When his uncle died a few months later, Will inherits the shop–and an unexpected problem: Men who insist will turn over the document.

I liked Will. I liked his friend Maisie.

Will had asked her dancing early on in their acquaintance, and they’d had some very pleasant evenings. Then he had walked into a storeroom at work, and found the senior shop-floor clerk trapping her there. He’d removed the man without ceremony, using his boot, and been summarily dismissed.

I liked Phoebe.

“I think you’re rather lovely,” he said, startling himself.

“I know I am,” Phoebe assured him. “But it’s always nice to be told so.”

And I very much like how Kim is introduced and presented. He never explains himself, and we are left to piece together his history (which is different from what he says) as well as his motivations (which are also different from what he claims).

Having the story only from Will’s point of view means we see only what Kim presents, and (like Will) have to deduce Kim’s secrets and motivations.

I fear that with the 100th anniversary of the end of the war and the Spanish Flu, we may eventually get a lot of books about this time period. But there haven’t been many in the past, so I’ll enjoy what I find now.

Publisher: KJC Books

Rating: 8/10

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