Barbara’s rating: 3.6
Series: The Gambler’s Daughters #3
Publication Date: 5/27/25
Period: Regency – 1816
Number of Pages: 365

This book has one of the best opening lines I’ve read in a very long time. “He’d asked for the oldest whore in the house.” That certainly gets your attention. I did enjoy Beckett (Beck) Steele and Gwendolyn Lanscarr, but they were the only characters I even remotely liked. With a spectacular opening line and a dissatisfying finish, this book was all over the place for me. I loved the gist of the story, but I found it a tad slow and found myself putting it down much more often than I normally do with a book I’m reading. Perhaps that was me, and I was just more distracted. Not sure, but I felt there could have been more exciting things happening.

Beckett Steele is a war hero who ‘helps’ people. Often, that means finding things or people for them. Those tasks are quite lucrative, but he often declines money and asks them to grant him a favor at a future time when he asks. Usually, those favors are asked in furtherance of a personal pursuit – finding his mother. He’s sure she is a light-skirt because he’d lived in a bawdy house until a man came and put him in a boarding school. After being injured in the wars, Beck was determined to find out what happened to his mother. Is she alive? Is the woman in his dreams his mother?

Gwendolyn is one of three Irish sisters who pooled all of their resources to travel to London, participate in the season, and find suitable husbands. The two previous books in the series showed Gwendolyn’s sisters finding their HEAs. Gwendolyn met a man in Ireland, who has consumed all of her thoughts since. He helped her win enough money playing Whist so she and her sisters could implement their plan. All he asked in return was a favor to be granted at some future time.

I enjoyed that Gwendolyn made no secret of her fixation on Beck – and that he was thoroughly convinced he had no feelings for Gwendolyn. Watching the attraction grow, and watching Beck wrestle with those pesky ‘feelings’ he kept having, made the search for Beck’s mother an enjoyable read. I would have liked a bit more excitement and a slightly faster pace, but it was a nice read. One of the things that dampened my enthusiasm was that none (save one) of the villains got any punishment at all. If you look at what they did, could you just walk away and leave them unpunished? I couldn’t. But – that was followed by the HEA, and I did enjoy that.

I voluntarily read an early copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

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