Never Gamble Your Heart (Forever (Grand Central Publishing), pub date Feb 4, 2025, 384pp, $17.99)
Genre: Romance with mystery.
A charming Victorian romance, updated for modern values regarding women’s independence, but quite lovely, well-told, and eminently readable. I tore through it (even while taking notes!).
I read an ARC of this (Advanced Reading Copy) because I’m a bookseller and it’s one of my perks. You’ll see me making some references to confusing continuity I found — I am hoping this was found by the copyeditor and author, but the version I read had a thanks to the copyeditor in the back, and that means continuity errors may still occur in it. They didn’t detract from the enjoyment of the book, however, even though I was a copyeditor for decades for the major publishers and I have a magpie’s brain for this sort of stuff.
That said, the book entails a Victorian governess on her first job, which is also her first job for the Dove, a shadowy woman who helps women in need by using an organization she trains of young unmarried women to go into wealthy homes to solve problems, most likely mysteries. She is there to solve the mystery of the men without huge fortunes who are marrying well-endowed women and the women then disappear from society. Her sister is one of them and she’s determined to discover the ringleader of this group, as well as the men who are participating. Hijinks ensue, of course, and in this case a love match is formed, with a rake who owns the most infamous (and biggest) gambling hell in London.
I must note that the scandal and mystery of twenty (with one additional ringleader) lords who sit in the House of Lords and their votes, garnered by the ringleader marrying them off to richly dowried young women (who are also troublesome, apparently), becomes a problem with continuity in the ARC. Only the Dove knows the identity of the lords in question, and in fact she only knows they *are* lords, not their names. And yet a turning point in the mystery is that knowledge, complete with names, being known by the heroine and her fiance — without that information, the plot doesn’t work. I hope this is fixed before publication.
I highly recommend this book otherwise, and look forward to more in this series. I was alerted to this by a review in Publisher’s Weekly; their praise was certainly appropriate.
(please excuse typos in this — unforgivable for a former copyeditor, but I have Covid and am running a high fever. Yes, this is what booksellers do when they’re home sick; they still work.)
