“That was a foul thought, planning to trap his friends into admissions, but they weren’t his friends any more, and one of them had murdered Toby.”
Apparently this is being referred to as “dark academia” by quite a few people, but not knowing much about that subgenre (although I certainly should add that expression to my book vocabulary) I’ll stick with a mystery story, an amateur 1905 investigation into a decade-old murder at Oxford by a man who not only feels that his life has been ruined by that murder but who also knows that the murder had been committed by one of his formerly close-knit group of friends.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to remember all the golden times and how wonderful it was. It’s such a lovely lie, and it makes everything worse now. Stop dreaming about the spires. It was a dreadful place and those were dreadful people, and you and I got caught in their games and paid for it. And you may not want to remember how much we hurt each other, but Toby is rotting in the ground to prove it.
One of the reasons I like K.J. Charles’s books despite overall being quite wary of romance genre was that they have always been mystery first and romance second — but this one is a straight historical mystery with romance barely in the background, just enriching the story rather than being the story. And that’s what I like. And sex mechanics are off page too, and therefore are not distracting — a brief “It had been tender and gentle, and it had felt at once utterly alien after so long of nothing but knees on cold floors and the hard hands of strangers” is worth ten pages of play-by-play sex mechanics that to me are often awkward and unintentionally funny.
It’s a book of young hopes and dreams and the shattered illusions that university opens the doors for everyone to the good life in a class-conscious society, and the scars our youth can leave on us. It’s brief and somewhat episodic in its pre-murder timeline, but despite brevity is still full with the pain of strained friendships and falsehoods and entitlements and resentments (even if some of that does get healed eventually). It’s a sad story above all, with no satisfying comeuppance or brilliant conclusions — but with promise of healing, which is the best to hope for.
I liked it even if I wasn’t fully sold on some plot points — but ultimately it didn’t matter given that quiet and satisfied enjoyment it gave me in the end.
Solid 4 stars.
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Thanks to NetGalley and Storm Publishing for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
books are life 