Review: Copper Script

Copper Script by K.J. Charles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Its post WW1, Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler is part of the Metropolitan Police, he has struggled to overcome two obstacles, his adopted father who was a firebrand unionist, and his aristocratic relations on his mother's side. One if his aristocratic cousins, Paul, comes to him complaining that a charlatan graphologist by the name of Joel Wildsmith has broken up his engagement to a wealthy society heiress by telling a pack of lies and he wants Aaron to investigate/prosecute.

Joel lost his left hand during the war, just his luck that he was left-handed to begin with. Jobs are short on the ground for the able-bodied, let alone a one-handed man who can barely write, but he discovered a knack of understanding people's feelings/emotions through reading their handwriting and he is scratching a living at it.

When Fowler goes to confront Joel he goes undercover with three samples of handwriting to analyse and is shocked by the accuracy of the reading. Convinced there is a trick of some kind, he and a colleague devise a blind test, the colleague will select an ongoing case at random and provide samples of handwriting from several suspects, Fowler will add some control samples from non-suspects and the samples will be numbered. Joel will read each of the samples and give his impressions. The samples and Joel's impressions (written down by Fowler) will be placed in an envelope and sealed pending the successful resolution of the case.

The results are astounding, Joel's reading were amazingly accurate, but it's his chilling reading of one of the control samples that causes consternation. Can Joel and Fowler expose a powerful criminal before he catches up with them?

I loved this, as I love everything KJ writes. It feels like it might be the start of a series and I couldn't be happier.

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