British
KJ Charles spent over twenty years editing other people's books, including a stint at Mills & Boon, before publishing her own. She started with The Magpie Lord in 2013, self-releasing it because no major house was buying Victorian fantasy romances between men. Readers found it anyway. Her novels run on period detail and dialogue — a magician swearing in a Lambeth drawing room, a Tory bureaucrat and the radical bookseller he keeps meeting in the dark, jewel thieves working a country-house weekend. She writes in tight, interlocking series: A Charm of Magpies, Society of Gentlemen, Sins of the Cities, the Lilywhite Boys, the Will Darling Adventures. They share a London, and minor characters walk out of one book into their own. Spectred Isle was a RITA finalist. The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen drew a Lambda Literary Award nomination and a place on Library Journal's best romances of 2023. Orion picked up The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting after she self-published it; Tor signed her for three books, starting with How to Fake It in Society in 2026.