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A review by am_paro
Death in the Spires by KJ Charles
5.0
I devoured this, absolutely love a good mystery. This particular sub-genre of mystery is "group of people reminisce about a person murdered a long time ago who was actually an asshole and on second thought nobody feels terribly bad about it."
The story just worked really well. KJ Charles kept it short and relatively tight, but still included several twists and turns. I especially appreciate the amount of research that goes into Charles's books and that was apparent here, setting the story firmly in Oxford/surrounding area/a bit of London in the 1890s and 19-aughts. Charles is adept at letting the historical facts underpinning the setting, characters, and story come through very naturally, without beating everyone over the head with exhaustive details. Yeah, if I had to pick between Death in the Spires and that one Lord John Something mystery by Diana Gabaldon I read a while back...I would pick Death in the Spires.
If I could convince Charles to do a rewrite of this already excellent and thoroughly enjoyable mystery, I would ask for
- Make it longer. It's short, and it works, but if it was longer, there would be more space to explore...
- Deeper looks at each of the characters. It felt very like an Agatha Christie short story at points, with characters deftly and quickly sketched out, but so much of the tension in the book relied on an emotional connection between characters that I found myself wishing for more.
- Flesh out the romances more. Both the Jem-Nicky and Aaron-Ella romances needed more to satisfy me. I took them at face value and it worked, of course, but sometimes I didn't really know how these lovebirds felt about each other. I really wanted more 1890s interactions between Aaron and Ella. For Nicky and Jem, the difficulty was that they were rekindling their romance DURING the story and I still wasn't sure that Nicky liked Jem. And vice versa, honestly. Maybe it's an inscrutable historical English male emotional suppression thing?? I have no idea. But I needed at some point for Nicky and Jem to just SAY it, because it was so ambiguous until, like, the last page.
And maybe add a glossary of Oxford University-specific things like tutorials and porters? In my defense I DID try to google things. Like, it seems "Hall" is basically a cafeteria and sometimes the professors will eat there too.
The story just worked really well. KJ Charles kept it short and relatively tight, but still included several twists and turns. I especially appreciate the amount of research that goes into Charles's books and that was apparent here, setting the story firmly in Oxford/surrounding area/a bit of London in the 1890s and 19-aughts. Charles is adept at letting the historical facts underpinning the setting, characters, and story come through very naturally, without beating everyone over the head with exhaustive details. Yeah, if I had to pick between Death in the Spires and that one Lord John Something mystery by Diana Gabaldon I read a while back...I would pick Death in the Spires.
If I could convince Charles to do a rewrite of this already excellent and thoroughly enjoyable mystery, I would ask for
- Make it longer. It's short, and it works, but if it was longer, there would be more space to explore...
- Deeper looks at each of the characters. It felt very like an Agatha Christie short story at points, with characters deftly and quickly sketched out, but so much of the tension in the book relied on an emotional connection between characters that I found myself wishing for more.
- Flesh out the romances more. Both the Jem-Nicky and Aaron-Ella romances needed more to satisfy me. I took them at face value and it worked, of course, but sometimes I didn't really know how these lovebirds felt about each other. I really wanted more 1890s interactions between Aaron and Ella. For Nicky and Jem, the difficulty was that they were rekindling their romance DURING the story and I still wasn't sure that Nicky liked Jem. And vice versa, honestly. Maybe it's an inscrutable historical English male emotional suppression thing?? I have no idea. But I needed at some point for Nicky and Jem to just SAY it, because it was so ambiguous until, like, the last page.
And maybe add a glossary of Oxford University-specific things like tutorials and porters? In my defense I DID try to google things. Like, it seems "Hall" is basically a cafeteria and sometimes the professors will eat there too.