Copper Script by K.J. Charles
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, historical romance, M/M romance, queer romance, romantic suspense
Pages: 255
Published by KJC Books on May 29, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler of the Metropolitan Police doesn’t count himself a gullible man. When he encounters a graphologist who deduces people’s lives and personalities from their handwriting with impossible accuracy, he needs to find out how the trick is done. Even if that involves spending more time with the intriguing, flirtatious Joel Wildsmith than feels quite safe.
Joel’s not an admirer of the police, but DS Fowler has the most irresistible handwriting he’s ever seen. If the policeman’s tests let him spend time unnerving the handsome copper, why not play along?
But when Joel looks at a powerful man's handwriting and sees a murderer, the policeman and the graphologist are plunged into deadly danger. Their enemy will protect himself at any cost--unless the sparring pair can come together to prove his guilt and save each other.

My Review:

The very first scene of Copper Script lays pretty much everything bare; family ties and expectations, the assumption that people will bow down to their “betters”, the frenetic surface gaiety of the post-World War I period, the corruption of the police, the damage the war left behind, the terrors and abuses of the English ‘public school’ system and just how much and how often an upright man has to fight his own internal battles to hang onto his soul in the face of destruction.

That’s a lot, isn’t it?

And yet, the story opens with one of society’s Bright Young Things, Mr. Paul Napier-Fox, putting pressure on Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler of the Metropolitan Police, his cousin, to put the frighteners on the man who convinced his former fiancee to become his former fiancee by informing her that he, Napier-Fox, was cheating on her by analysing his handwriting.

The problem for Napier-Fox is that the truth isn’t slander or libel. He doesn’t care, he expects that his family’s position in society will allow him to lie and get away with it. He expects Fowler to make the case go away. He expects that his position in both society and their family gives him carte blanche to use his cousin to do his dirty work.

Because in addition to being Fowler’s ‘better’ in society, Napier-Fox knows Fowler’s secret. Fowler is homosexual at a time when simply being who he is is still very much illegal. Napier-Fox can take EVERYTHING away from Fowler at a moment’s notice, and they both know it.

Which is where graphologist Joel Wildsmith comes into the picture – and possibly the frame as well. Wildsmith has a preternatural gift for analyzing handwriting. He doesn’t claim to tell the future, he doesn’t pretend he knows the person whose handwriting he is studying, he doesn’t ask for anything beyond a fee for his time that isn’t nearly enough.

But Fowler convinces himself – as he often does – with the twisted logic that what Wildsmith does isn’t possibly by any legal means. He’s either defrauding his clients or he’s practicing magic. Both of which are illegal and so the man is worthy of investigation.

And that’s where this queer historical mystery/romantic suspense story goes off to the races at a very fast clip.

Fowler tries to prove Wildsmith is a fraud. Instead, Wildsmith proves that he’s the real deal – whatever that deal might actually be. Then he goes on to show Fowler that one of his police superiors is rotten to the bone.

Together, they hatch a hare-brained scheme to get the man bang to rights before he can get to them. All the while, they’re trying – and failing – to resist the temptation to bang each other. They don’t need to put an even bigger target on their backs, but the heart wants what the heart wants – even when on the trail of a bastard with no heart at all.

Escape Rating B+: This has been a ‘mixed feelings’ kind of a week as far as reading goes, and this book is no exception. Dammit.

Very much on the one, and much happier, hand, I fell straight into Copper Script, loved the characters, and pretty much read it in one sitting. I just plain liked Fowler and Wildsmith, liked even more that they liked each other AND their very witty banter on the way to a relationship.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder how the hell this was going to get to anything remotely near a happy ending. The story is set in the very much real 1920s, meaning that even the hint of their relationship has the potential to send them to jail. It paints a huge target on their backs, all the bigger because Fowler is charged with enforcing the law while he’s personally disobeying it.

That Fowler is personally a mess as a result of his internal conflict isn’t a surprise at all. The man is so brittle that the reader expects him to break – and he does.

The other issue with this being the historical 1920s and not a fictional or fantastical version is that graphology is a pseudoscience at best. Scientific handwriting analysis compares handwriting to determine whether documents were written by the same person – it doesn’t psychoanalyze the person who wrote the documents.

In other words, what Joel Wildsmith does slips over the border into magic, but the story treats it as science. He’s a fascinating, fantastic, wonderful character, but a big chunk of the story hinges on him having an ability that doesn’t exist in the real world where this story purports to be set.

Admittedly, slipping this story over the line into fantasy or magical realism would have solved the potential happy ever after problem as well. There’s a gossamer hint of at least a happy for now, but it would have felt a LOT more plausible in a fantasy setting because the rules could be changed to make it so.

As I keep saying, I fell straight into this one and didn’t emerge until the end. As much as I enjoyed this while I was in it, looking back at what I’d just finished left me with a curious feeling. The story combines two elements that often go great together, a historical mystery and a historical romance. So the story has to push both things forward, the romance and the investigation.

Which it does. But the scenes that move the romance forward – all the banter between Fowler and Wildsmith as well as the sex scenes – are all onscreen. There’s a lot of conversation – as there should be as they do talk and angst each other into bed – but the progress of the relationship is SHOWN and not just TOLD.

With the mystery/investigation, it’s the opposite. Most of the scenes that push the investigation forward occur offscreen. The reader, along with Fowler himself – is TOLD what happened but generally doesn’t see it happen with his own two eyes until the crisis point.

We all do learn enough, we still get caught up in the tension and the danger, but, well, it’s a big but in my thoughts now that I know how it all turned out.

One final thing – I facepalmed when I thought about the title afterwards, because the title is a pun. Fowler is a ‘copper’ and Wildsmith studies ‘script’. Ouch.

If you liked Copper Script, or even liked the sound of it or the description, an excellent – and more plausible – readalike is Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen and the entire Andy Mills series that follows it. The next book in that series, Mirage City, is coming this fall and I can’t wait.

Howsomever, and back to Copper Script, I did fall straight into it. I had a great time reading it. The niggles all came after – albeit with a bit of a vengeance. KJ Charles is an author who has been recommended to me on multiple occasions, and I did enjoy her Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting a few years back. So I’ll certainly keep her in mind the next time I need something to break a reading slump – as Copper Script absolutely did this time around!