I’m aware that this novel is part of its own series of works with interwoven characters, but I’d be lying if I said the point of reading this was anything more than proximity to Will Darling and my favorite ne’er-do-well aristo with red tendencies Kim Secretan 🙂
Throughout the Will Darling series, we hear about and at times run into DS, the mysterious head of the Private Bureau. Less often we run into Curtis, the henchman who’s responsible for being the muscle. Fly with me back to ye older times, to understand how these two became the proto Will-and-Kim (seriously, is it like required to have a cultured, slender openly queer fall for a brutish, loyal still-sort-of-closeted queer in each of these books).
Archibald (Archie) Curtis lost two fingers and a lot of loyalty to Crown and Monarch in the war (not WW1 because time, so maybe Crimea? Guess who’s got two thumbs and has already passed her Life in the UK test and so can’t be bothered to remember!). There was a blunder which Archie is not 100% certain wasn’t some form of sabotage, and now he’s got evidence that might exonerate his battalion. Because he is stubborn or whatever, he doesn’t try to work on this problem with his uncle who is the head of the Private Bureau or something equivalent, but gets himself invited up to the manor where the suspects lie in wait. There he runs into two things: first, a literal honeypot trap, wherein sexy housestaff lure guests into indecent acts of same sex attraction for blackmail purposes, and two, a sexy guest (Daniel da Silva) who is many things all of which cause consternation–he’s Jewish! Portuguese! Openly Gay, insofar as anyone can be!
Archie and Daniel get into all sorts of capers in trying to prove that their hosts are not only bad but Bad Bad, and in the middle of the adventuring they, obviously, have feelings at one another. They also will obviously succeed because they’re in the later novels, but there are moments of genuine suspense as to how thorough their success will be. I enjoyed this quite a bit (but probably added a star for the in-universe connection)
