From the little I have read from that time period she gets it right when it came to unfit to print books, photographs, and book stores. I liked the historical element of it where people's behavior and actions can put them in jail. Will they find the boy? Will they solve their differences and pasts? Will this bring them together or apart?I liked this story. The two men band together to find the boy as well as a few other things. Resentment is brought out as they reacquaint themselves with each other. Vik comes knocking at Gil's door and is shocked to find Gil alive and well. Meanwhile a family asks Vikmar, a solicitor and Gil's old friend who thinks Gil is dead, to look for their 16-year-old son.

He strikes a deal with Percy and then, with Percy's help, loads it and takes it back to his bookstore. He refuses until asked by his cousin Percy who shows him his half-brother's book and photography collection then asks him to dispose of it of which Gil can have any money he makes from it. Gil has been requested to come to his half-brother's funeral.

Read it to be a Charles completest but know that it's just not the best of their works. 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. The relationship picks up like no time passed and there's some crime solving in between. 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. Due to lack of a communication and misunderstanding, Gil had forgotten about Vikram after having felt completely abandoned by him. This takes him to Gil's bookshop and a reunion with his long lost best friend. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Charles is one of my favourite historical MM writers but this one left me a little disappointed.

Unfit to Print by K.J. Charles