Unfit to Print

Charles is one of my favourite historical MM writers but this one left me a little disappointed.
It's an outlier in that both main characters are POC but the murder-mystery plot and even the relationship between the two just felt insipid. It either needed to be longer so as to develop the characters and their past a bit more, or needed to lose the mystery plot and just be a character-driven romance.
Since I'm neither from the late 1800s Britain or POC I found it hard to tell if this whole situation was realistic or not. Gil is a biracial man who was abandoned by his white brothers after their father dies, which we find out later is more due to greed and hypocrisy rather than his colouring. He's nonetheless picked himself up by the bootstraps and is now the owner and sole-operator of a bookstore in the seedier part of London that also has dealings with black-market pornography. Vikram is an old childhood friend and now lawyer-advocate for the disenfranchised and immigrant community who is looking for leads in the disappearance of a young Indian man. This takes him to Gil's bookshop and a reunion with his long lost best friend. Due to lack of a communication and misunderstanding, Gil had forgotten about Vikram after having felt completely abandoned by him. Where Vikram has never forgotten Gil and is shocked to find he's not only alive but well and an integral part of his mysterious case.

The relationship picks up like no time passed and there's some crime solving in between. The main thing that makes this a Charles book is the heartfelt dialogue between the two as well as a few well-written sexual scenes and a HFN ending. Read it to be a Charles completest but know that it's just not the best of their works.