The Sugared Game

Paperback, 286 pages

Published Aug. 23, 2020 by Kjc Books, KJC Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-912688-18-0

(1 review)

It’s been two months since bookseller Will Darling saw Kim Secretan and he doesn’t expect to see him again. What do a rough and ready ex-soldier and a disgraced shady aristocrat have to do with each other anyway?

But when Will encounters a face from the past in a disreputable nightclub, Kim turns up again—as shifty, unreliable, and irresistible as ever. And before Will knows it, he’s been dragged back into Kim’s shadowy world of criminal conspiracies and underhand dealings.

This time, though, things are underhand even by Kim standards. This time, the danger is too close to home. And if Will and Kim can’t find common ground against unseen enemies, they risk losing everything.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed The Sugared Game by K. J. Charles

4 stars

The Sugared Game is the second book in this 1920's queer post-war romance trilogy. It continues the very hot and cold relationship between Will and Kim amidst the background of the investigation of criminal enterprises. My own bias is a reader is that I feel like complicated relationships where people by turns treat each other poorly need sufficient explanation of the glue that keeps them still together. This book does a good job of continuing to develop rationale for why each of them still finds the other appealing and also why the things that don't work really don't work.

Thematically I appreciated that in this book both Will and Kim got what for in their "Kim-ish" behaviors. In particular, there's a number of incidents where Will unconsciously ends up behaving like Kim, using others for his own ends and keeping secrets to protect others, and there's emotional repercussions for these …

The Sugared Game is the second book in this 1920's queer post-war romance trilogy. It continues the very hot and cold relationship between Will and Kim amidst the background of the investigation of criminal enterprises. My own bias is a reader is that I feel like complicated relationships where people by turns treat each other poorly need sufficient explanation of the glue that keeps them still together. This book does a good job of continuing to develop rationale for why each of them still finds the other appealing and also why the things that don't work really don't work.

Thematically I appreciated that in this book both Will and Kim got what for in their "Kim-ish" behaviors. In particular, there's a number of incidents where Will unconsciously ends up behaving like Kim, using others for his own ends and keeping secrets to protect others, and there's emotional repercussions for these choices. In some ways though, I feel like this helped create more understanding of Kim as well, to more directly see him through the parallels of Will's actions and to see the way that Will is indirectly influenced by him.

I appreciated that this book had even more Phoebe and Maisie, who are both delightful characters. I also said after the first book that I was hoping to learn more about Kim's past to understand him better, and this book definitely dug into some of his professional secrets (and the third book looks like it might get into more family things, based on its blurb).