2017/59: An Unnatural Vice -- K J Charles

Conscience makes flats of us all, Justin thought. How lucky I don’t have one. [loc. 1231]

Nathaniel Roy is an investigative journalist, the atheist son of an archbishop, and desperately lonely despite the good friends who've stood by him through love and loss. Justin Lazarus is the Seer of London, one of the most successful (and most expensive) spiritualists in the city, and determined that he'll never again be obligated to anybody. Nathaniel, of course, is keen to expose Justin Lazarus as a fraud. But Justin knows how to find a client's weaknesses, and he promises something that Nathaniel, against all reason, wants to believe in. As the two are thrown together by their shared involvement in a true-life melodrama of aristocracy, murder and disguise, each finds something unexpected -- and unexpectedly admirable -- in the other.

This is the second in the trilogy that began with An Unseen Attraction, and it weaves around the latter half of that novel, focussing on different characters. The melodrama advances; we see Clem and Rowley from a different perspective; the role of the Jack -- a place where men like Nathaniel can go 'to be true' -- is expanded; and the romance here has an entirely different, and much sharper, flavour.

I confess I like Justin Lazarus, even though he is objectively a fraudster who preys on the bereaved and needy: he is also intelligent, observant, and often very funny. (It's all right: Nathaniel likes him too, and makes the distinction between 'a bad man' and 'a good man doing bad things'.) And I sympathise more than I probably should with Justin's vow that he'll never again be indebted to anyone, never again have to beg or be grateful. I didn't warm to Nathaniel as quickly, but he is one of the most humane characters I've encountered in recent fiction: and his impressive self-knowledge, coupled with the gradual realisation that he's living his life around absences, makes for a satisfying emotional arc.

And as usual, I loved all the little details: the daily routine of a Victorian medium's household; the nervousness with which Justin ventures out on the first solitary country walk of his life; Polish Mark and his no-nonsense approach to Nathaniel's emotional turmoil; and Justin's sense of humour, which is as spiky as he is, and produces the immortal line 'my spirit guide's a fucking tart'. You can get it on a t-shirt now.

Also, though Nathaniel and Justin's story is ... well, not finished, but resolved -- there is a frightfully teasing conclusion. Is it time for An Unsuitable Heir yet?