two, two, two reviews in one

[fox]

In the past two months I have been fortunate enough to read not one but two ARCs for upcoming novels by KJ Charles. One was Copper Script, which you'll notice has already been actually published. The other was All of Us Murderers, out in October 2025. So here we go, two reviews, one tardy, one timely, happy to separate them into two different posts if someone official would prefer that I do that.

Copper Script
The author said this book arrived more or less fully formed in her mind in the middle of an errand one morning. And it kind of has that sort of breathless, quick-write-it-all-down-before-you-forget-any-of-it vibe. I do not, repeat, do not think it feels underwritten, as some have said (maybe they haven't said it in public? I'm not even looking to see if I should hyperlink to others' opinions), but compared for example to All of Us Murderers (q.v.) it feels . . . hm, more like a thrill ride than a museum tour, if you see what I mean.

Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler of the London Metropolitan Police Service's Criminal Investigation Division is the titular copper; Joel Wildsmith, who lost his dominant hand in the Great War, has a preternatural gift for graphology—handwriting analysis—as well as ginger hair, representing both copper and the titular script. They Meet Cute when Aaron agrees to look into Joel's purported skills on behalf of a cousin he doesn't like. Aaron, a rare (but not entirely unique) honest policeman, is skeptical; Joel, who really can do what he says he can do, has no use for the police. So naturally their fates become entwined and Joel has an insight that reveals something surprising about a case Aaron is working on and they fall for each other, there's a certain amount of peril, and we know all along that it will turn out okay, but they don't know they live in a romance novel, so they feel a certain amount of relief when they end up happy together after only having known each other for a few weeks' time.

I admit I was confused at the beginning of the book by a small number of things that turned out not to be important. If I hadn't read practically every word of KJ Charles's backlist, it wouldn't have taken me 30 pages to work out that this book is set firmly in the world we know rather than one of the ones where magic is real. Meanwhile, I spent way longer than that expecting that it would turn out to be relevant that Aaron (and his sister Sarah) or Joel or both were Jewish; but not only did that not turn out to be relevant—it didn't even turn out to be true. So then I spent a while wondering why I assumed characters with Jewish names had to be Jewish. (I don't automatically expect a girl named Sarah to be Jewish, but when her brother's name is Aaron I expect it a lot more than when his name is something like Geoffrey.) KJ Charles has explicitly Jewish characters in four books three properties (two different series and one standalone novel), if I'm counting properly, and their names are Daniel, Esther, David, and Daniel. I've been quietly irritated about that before—why must Jewish characters have such "obviously" Jewish names? (as if there weren't a Gentile named David in yet another series by the same author)—and then here I am reading characters with "Jewish names" and being surprised that they don't turn out to be Jewish at all. Probably that says more about me than it does about anything else. For one thing, actually, Joel (but not Aaron) could indeed be Jewish, for all we know, because it doesn't come up in the book. For another, though, I'd frankly love it if there were a character who were overtly Jewish for reasons utterly unrelated to the plot— I don't know, just mention that the guy will be unavoidably busy on Saturday—and I'd do handsprings if he were named something utterly goyish like Declan. Maybe all unlikely in a historical, but that's where my mind went with the names.

Other pluses include a secondary character who is everyone's favorite by miles and miles, hope to see her in a spinoff yesterday; other minuses include one (1) plot point that I thought was handled just a tiny bit more heavy-handedly than it needed to have been. Can't say a lot more about that because spoilers, but suffice it to say that when an author has planted a seed, come harvest time I don't need to be told now we are harvesting the thing we planted, see? I can just watch the payoff happen and appreciate it myself. When you read the book you may see what I mean.

Meanwhile: The two leads only shag twice on the page, which is a little low for the genre and for this author in particular—the mystery/thriller side of the story gets more attention than the romance—but this book having had its inspiration in a grocery run shows through in a couple of restaurant scenes that are almost as hot as the sex. (Though that's another point that confused me: They talk about Indian food, and then they talk about beef curry, and I would simply never expect to see beef on an Indian menu at all—of course then the proprietor of the Indian restaurant is named Rahim Mohammed and I conclude that because this whole thing takes place before the Partition the beef-at-an-Indian-restaurant thing is not worth my worrying about, and in fact in the chat server British folk assure me that in the UK both Indian and Pakistani restaurants serve both beef and pork and there's me overthinking the whole business yet again.) If you don't put the book down craving palak paneer and gianduja tiramisu, then God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.

All of Us Murderers
Contrariwise, this book is carefully assembled in a way that shows the creator has got a solid handle on the craft and knows it. This is the docent-led museum tour compared to the roller-coaster of Copper Script. It doesn't quite have a checklist in its pocket, but it feels like it might have thought about having one, decided not to, and be giving you a wink about it as you follow it along. The vibe I got was very Knives Out (2019) x Clue (1985) x Agatha Christie (I can't say which novel without giving away more than I should).

Zebedee Wyckham (yes) has been invited to his ancestral home by its current owner, a first cousin whom he hardly knows; the other guests include his brother and sister-in-law and another first cousin, none of whom he likes. Completing the party are one more further-distant cousin and the homeowner's secretary, who turns out to be someone with whom Zebedee has A Complicated Past. When I tell you the book opens with Zebedee being driven to the house by a chauffeur who barely speaks to him, and the first thing that happens when he gets there is that a young woman in a white peignoir comes running from the house and disappears, sobbing, into the grounds—you can tell exactly what kind of story this is going to be, and it doesn't disappoint.

Amusingly, Zebedee knows what kind of story he's living in, and that's lucky for him. The Gothic horror and mystery of it all was solid; I think I picked up all but one of the hints the book laid down at the times I was meant to get them, so I had the satisfying experience of being with or as much as one step ahead of the characters solving the mystery. (And the one I missed was carefully constructed to be missable!) The romance—for of course Zebedee and Gideon, the Complicated Past haver, reunite and make efforts to Uncomplicate their Present—worked for me but I think it worked in spite of the in medias res of it all rather than because of it. The exposition came in dribs and drabs because of course the POV character already knows what he already knows and doesn't need to infodump for the reader; in fact knowing as he does that he's in a Gothic horror mystery romance, naturally he wouldn't, but rather would leave bread crumbs for us to discover in our own time. Still, though. A reader reading something like Dear God, it was Gideon, who probably hadn't forgiven Zeb, nor should he have been expected to can be excused for thinking "forgiven him for what?!!?" I know that's the point. I'm just saying.

I counted one thing mentioned earlyish that didn't pay off as much as I'd have liked (it wasn't just left completely hanging, but the wrapup in the epilogue was less than I'd hoped for) and, conversely, one payoff-type event that I didn't think had had sufficient groundwork laid for it (and even that's not, like, the thing in whichever Hitchhiker's book it is where Arthur Dent is reading a novel where the hero dies of thirst and he has to slog back through the book to find that they did in fact mention some trouble with the plumbing in chapter 2; there's more setup than that, just not as much as I'd have liked). In a book this complex, that's not a bad ratio!

Prequel pls?

Both titles: A+ would recommend.