KJ Charles understands something most historical romance authors don't: setting isn't decoration, it's a weapon.
I've been recommending Charles to my podcast listeners for years, specifically because she writes queer historical fiction that refuses to sand down the edges. Her characters don't exist in some fantasy version of the past where nobody cares who you love. They exist in a world that will destroy them for it, and that tension - that dread - is what makes her romances hit harder than most horror I consume. Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen takes that principle and drops it into the Romney Marsh, a landscape so bleak and strange it functions like a third protagonist. Or maybe a slow-acting poison.
The Marsh Is the Monster Here
So here's the setup: Gareth Inglis, a lonely, sharp-edged clerk, inherits a baronetcy and a crumbling estate in the middle of nowhere. The Marsh is lawless, controlled by smuggling families who've been running goods for generations. And Joss Doomsday - the man Gareth fell for during a brief, devastating London affair - runs the biggest clan. Their reunion isn't sweet. It's a collision. Gareth is about to testify against Joss's sister. Joss shows up to stop him. The romance that rebuilds from that wreckage is slow, suspicious, and genuinely earned.
What Charles does brilliantly is refuse to make either man wrong. Gareth is an outsider who doesn't understand the unwritten codes of the Marsh. Joss is protecting his family with the only tools he has. The class divide between them isn't just background flavor - it's the engine of every conflict, every misunderstanding, every moment where trust almost breaks. Charles has clearly done her research on the historical smuggling culture of Romney Marsh, and it shows in the specificity of the world. The way the Doomsday family operates, the local suspicion of outsiders, the casual violence that keeps the economy running - none of it feels like costume drama.
I listened to this during a late shift at the library, shelving returns in the dim back stacks (the fluorescent in the mystery section has been flickering for three weeks and maintenance is "aware"). Not horror, but the Marsh atmosphere translated surprisingly well to that energy. The isolation Gareth feels when he arrives at his father's house, a man he barely knew, surrounded by people who see him as either a threat or an irrelevance - I felt that.
Martyn Swain's Kentish Gamble
Here's where I need to be honest. Martyn Swain's narration is a specific acquired taste, like black coffee or a Shirley Jackson sentence that goes on for half a page and doesn't let you breathe until the very end. His Kentish accent for the Marsh locals is genuinely excellent - it's rare to hear that dialect in audiobooks, and it creates an immediate, almost physical boundary between Joss's world and Gareth's more received pronunciation. You can hear the class divide. That's the narrator doing real interpretive work.
But. The pacing. Swain pauses after words in a way that initially made me think my Bluetooth was glitching. Sentences that should flow get broken into fragments - not for dramatic effect, but as a consistent rhythmic choice that takes a solid hour or more to stop noticing. I bumped the speed to 1.25x around the thirty-minute mark and that smoothed it considerably. At normal speed, there were stretches where the stilted delivery pulled me out of scenes that should've been emotionally devastating.
Once I adjusted, though? The narrator commits. His Gareth is clipped and defensive, all tight vowels and careful distance. His Joss is warmer, looser, with a roughness that makes the tender moments land. The contrast works. It's just that the road to appreciating it has a few potholes.
Who Needs This (And Who Should Bail)
If you're a KJ Charles fan who loved her Society of Gentlemen series, this is the natural next step - same historical rigor, same refusal to simplify queer experience, but with a wilder, more atmospheric setting. If you like your romance tangled up in genuine mystery and real stakes - smuggling, betrayal, threats that feel consequential - you'll eat this up. Shirley Jackson walked so KJ Charles could run, and I say that knowing full well Jackson never wrote a romance. The point is the atmosphere. The dread of a place that doesn't want you there. That specific flavor of environmental menace — a place that feels alive and hostile — is something I also found in Into the Drowning Deep, where the ocean stops being a backdrop and starts being the thing hunting you.
If you need your audiobook narration smooth and frictionless from minute one, be prepared to either adjust your speed or white-knuckle through the first hour. And if you're looking for a light, breezy listen - the Marsh will chew you up.
Shelve this one next to your best historical fiction, not just your romance. It's earned the space.
Shirley (my cat) was unimpressed. I was quietly wrecked by the end.
