Review: Death in the Spires

Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Its 1905 and Jeremy (Jem) Kite is a lowly clerk. However, ten years ago his future looked promising, he had won a maths scholarship to St Anselm's college at Oxford and rather than being ostracised and looked down for his humble Midlands upbringing and his club foot, he became part of an eclectic group of seven friends led by Toby Feynsham. Collectively the friends were known as the Seven Wonders. There was Toby, heir apparent to the Marquess of Grevesham, beautiful and charismatic, his twin sister Ella, a brilliant chemist in her own right, Nicky Rook, jaded beyond his years studying English, Hugo Morley-Adams son of a wealthy shipbuilder studying history, Aaron Oyede a black man studying medicine with a wickedly dry sense of humour, and Prudence Lenster, Ella's roommate also studying maths. Collectively they were extremely clever, dominated at several sports, took the leads in a Shakespeare play and were generally the best and brightest of their year.

Everything started to go wrong the term they put on a production of Cymbeline, there seemed to be tensions between different factions, love triangles, spite, and jealousy. Then one terrible night, after the seven of them argued viciously, Toby was murdered with his letter opener in a locked room. The murderer was never found but the finger of suspicion cast its shadow on all of the remaining six, friendships shattered. Jem had a nervous breakdown, failed his exams and left Oxford, his future in ruins.

When someone sends an anonymous letter to Jem's employer accusing him of Toby's murder, Jem realises that he will never be free of the suspicion until the murderer is uncovered. He knows that he and his friends didn't tell the police everything about that night, and he suspects at least one person lied to give another an alibi. What the police don't know is that the door to Toby's rooms had a trick lock that you could lock from the outside, only the seven of them knew that and therefore Jem concludes that one of the remaining six must have been the murderer.

With some flashbacks to 1895, we follow Jem as he meets with his old friends, all of them have secrets, and none of them want him to pursue the truth. But Jem feels he has led a half-life for the last decade, afraid of being identified as one of the seven, afraid of being accused yet again of murder, having to leave one job after another, never making friends and he is determined to uncover the truth.

I really enjoyed this, about halfway through I started to feel that any of them could have been the murderer and perversely that I didn't want any of them to have done it. Given that, I thought the uncovering of the murderer was done very well.

Overall, I am fairly new to KJ Charles but have loved absolutely everything I have read so far.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

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