Spectred Isle

KJ Charles
Completed 5/5/2025 Reviewed 5/9/2025
3 Stars

This book was enjoyable romantasy fluff.  This is my first book by KJ Charles, a British woman with quite a prolific M/M romantasy body of work.  This, like many of her works, is a period romance taking place after WWI.  It is very British in its emphasis on manners and reputation.  Charles has a very large following despite being mostly self-published.  This book actually won a paranormal romance award when it was published.  I won’t say it’s great, but I had a hoot with it and particularly enjoyed the Green Man mythos it drew from.  And I am a sucker for gay romances, being a romantic at heart myself.  Alas, no sequels have been written yet despite two more being planned.

 

Saul Lazenby was disgraced and discharged from the army for having an affair with an enemy civilian and possibly leaking military secrets, though nothing was ever proven.  He does not know if his lover was a spy or not, or whether he loved him or not.  Formerly an archeologist in the Middle East, he now is an assistant to an older man who is obsessed with the occult.  Saul, a skeptic, goes on what he feels are wild goose chases to confirm paranormal areas for his boss.  At each step, he meets Randolph Glyde, a mysterious man who turns out to be truly involved with paranormal activity.  At first, they hate each other, but it turns into an enemies-to-lovers tale as the story unfolds.  Together, they try to uncover the source of strange occurrences around London while trying to avoid a newly formed government agency trying to rein in all the experts on the occult.

The character development of Saul is pretty good.  He starts out a nay-sayer, trying to avoid any interaction with people in general.  He’s sullen and withdrawn, having been cut off from everything he held dear in his life.  When he meets Randolph, he very slowly begins to open up, allowing himself to feel attracted to someone.  Since being expelled from the army, he has only been having anonymous hookups, feeling guilty about everything.  That changes with Randolph as they keep on having chance encounters and actually begin talking to each other rather than bickering.  Saul doesn’t come bursting out of the closet by the end of the book, but he does let himself fall in love.  

Randolph, on the other hand, carries a lot of his own guilt and grief.  His whole family were killed during a ritual during the war, a ritual to combat the paranormal war that was being waged behind the scenes.  Now, as the sole inheritor of the family’s magical responsibility, he tries to figure out all the paranormal activity happening around London and avoid bringing the unknowing Saul into it.  Randolph started out a little too foppish for me, but I relaxed my opinion of him as Saul’s interest and involvement grew.  Before I knew it, I was biting at the chomp for them to finally have their moment.

The prose is pretty good, as is the world building.  The paranormal stuff was strange, with monsters climbing out of the fen.  These swamp beast-men were definitely scary but also rather bizarre.  What I liked most when Randolph called the power of the Green Man to him to fight these creatures.  I would have liked more background on the Green Man mythos though, as it is rather esoteric.  We know it’s ancient and earth-based, but really little else.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  I think Charles could have done a lot more, but maybe that’s what she’s planning in the rest of the trilogy.  If she ever returns to finish it, I’ll definitely read it.  In the meantime, I have another trilogy by her that I got on sale with similar themes.  So I have my work cut out for in the field of gay romantasy.  I hope to get to those by the end of the year.  And this book was a nice break from the heavier reading of the Hugo and Nebula nominees.