Book 33: Spectred Isle by KJ Charles

Not entirely intentionally, I have read a bunch of books this summer that have been stories about England in the first half of the twentieth century, but with a twist of some kind. This one is set five years after the Great War ended, and it's focused on a man named Saul Lazenby whose life and career is ruined by his experience in the war, but not in the way most were. He takes a job working for an eccentric older Major who is convinced England is at the center of supernatural happenings, and he's there to provide information as someone who had studied archaeology but can no longer be employed in a real position. 

He encounters a tree that spontaneously alights, and also encounters Randolph Glyde, who shows up at every new location Saul is sent to in order to investigate the secrets of the past. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that there are in fact supernatural forces at work, a secret underworld of magic that had contributed to the War and subsequently weakened most of the protections that had existed for years. Randolph is the last of his family, which had been protectors of the world for centuries, and he's very grumpy about all of it. As the two of them are thrown together, their attraction to each other also grows and complicates everything even more. 

I liked a lot of aspects of this book, and the main pairing is a type that I generally enjoy a lot, two damaged people whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other in interesting ways. I wanted the mythology to be a bit more in some way, either more deeply explored or grounded, or even less explainable and incomprehensible. There were parts of it that were handwaved in ways that made it feel insubstantial to me, and I wanted it to either be more fully other or to not actually be supernatural at all. This is a book that at times felt like it wanted to be more of a speculative fiction novel and less of a romance, but in order for it to be that it would have needed to be far more detailed and complex to be satisfying for me. Still, I enjoyed it a lot, and this author writes very good early Twentieth Century gay romances in general. I think I would have preferred a book that was a more straightforward story about the Bright Young Things generation in Britain, and those who couldn't be (or refused to be) a part of that culture.

Grade: B