This story takes place in the fictional city of Leiscourt and stars a youma woman named Dellaria Wells. Delly is a fire witch, a con woman, and down and out. She needs money to make her rent when she sees an ad for Female Persons of Martial or Magical Ability to guard a Lady of Some Importance.

Getting hired on seems like a way out of her current financial difficulties. She is part of a crew consisting of two ladies with magical talent, a body scientist and her daughter Ermintrude who turns into a pig, and a high class girl who is part troll and is also skilled in martial arts. 

Delly takes one look at the crew and decides that Winn Cynallum, the part troll girl, is her ticket to future financial security and determines to seduce her. But her courtship is interrupted by someone actually attempting to murder the lady she's supposed to be guarding. She uses her magical ability to burn the spider-like creatures who stage numerous attacks. 

The bulk of the book concerns catching the villain and bringing her to justice. She is joined by the rest of the guards since, while she missed killing the lady, she did kill Ermintrude. Delly is mostly concerned with the reward that has been offered for bringing the villain to justice. She needs the money to help her mother get off the use of the latest drug of choice - red drip. Unfortunately, in order to track down the villain they have to turn into producers of red drip themselves because the villain is an addict and involved with the production of the drug.

Despite the ample use of dialect (which I hate), I enjoyed this story which was part mystery and part romance and featured an interesting main character and the girl who falls in love with her and helps her become her best self. I liked the various kinds of magic in the story and the general world building.

I really enjoyed this grittier side of life to Waggoners' world of wizardry. The dialect was fascinating and the scheme interesting! Cant wait to read more in the world.

Excellent.  The dialogue was as much fun as the action!  Thoroughly enjoyed it.  Can’t wait for more!

I really wanted to like this book but there was something off putting about the slangy, overly clever narrative style that I never quite got over. The plot never really took off for me either, perhaps simply because it was often overtaken by the narrative affect and the efforts to world build from the POV of a single character who is not terribly worldly themselves.

I thoroughly enjoyed the world building in this book! Delly was such a character and the story moved so quickly. I couldn't put this book down; as soon as I finished it I ordered Unnatural Magic to read next. More from C. M. Waggoner please!

To be honest, I'd hoped for more humor here - but the language was off-putting and the plot was fairly predictable.  I've rounded up from 2.5 stars because I enjoyed meeting Delly and Winn, and some of the ideas (like the marriage seclusion) were fun.

eARC provided by publisher via Netgalley.

Dellaria Wells is behind on her rent again.  She needs money so she becomes part of a team to be sure the young woman they are transporting to her wedding arrives safe.  Doesn't sound like a big job but it's not as easy as she thought.

Berkley and Net Galley let me read this book for review (thank you).  It will be published the 12th of January.

Dellaria finds one of her companions attractive.  Winn is attracted to her, too.  Things start going wrong right away.  One of the group is a shapeshifter and they find her dead.  They stick together and hope to find the sister who killed her younger sister.

There are all sorts of magical things in this story.  There's a dead mouse who comes back to life with the spirit of wizard  in the body.  When it starts decomposing the old lady boils it down to bones.  The bony shape still has the wizard's spirit in it and it even talks.

Nothing is going well with their job or their quest.  They visit an old house that has several locked rooms and begin lockpicking to see what's behind them.  

They find themselves in the drug business on their quest for the truth.  It's a scheme for getting information.

It's a fantasy all the way and I enjoyed the odd quirks and the unknowns the

This book found me at EXACTLY the right time. The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry is a delightful snarky mystery full of amazing strong women. I loved every minute.

Great fun with historical flavor! When their employer is almost murdered, a rag-tag band of bodyguards take on magicians and opium dealers in a rollicking fantasy tale set in an alternate-19th century London.

How delicious!  The wording is crazy amazing!  I started to write down some of my favorite lines but it got to be too much, but here are two:  

(Delly) She filed it all away in the cluttered hatbox of her brain...

Mrs. Gotham was such a nice old thing, even if she was a necromancer engaged in dread communication with some ancient wizarding demon trapped within the skeleton of a mouse.

Love the Buttons character. Love Winn who I kept picturing as Miranda Hart ☺️.

This is how I can easily say that it is well written- I devoured it, even with my own brain greatly addled by the year 2020!   I would love more of their story. 

Can’t wait to start recommending this to everyone.  Thanks for letting me read it!

This was a fun and imaginative book! I thought the worldbuilding was really unique and the relationships between the characters was really interesting and eventually very satisfying. I could see this being very popular with the YA and New Adult readers. Never thought I'd say I need a skeletal mouse sidekick, but here we are!

This was a flat-out, rollicking good adventure full of weird, eccentric, fun characters. You get a mystery, adventure and a romance set in a vaguely Victorian steampunk-ish world. It's the same world as CM Waggoner's first book, Unnatural Magic.

Delly is bawdy and always looking to scam someone but with a good heart and natural leadership under the vulgar, raggedy, and rough exterior. Her love interest is Winn, a half-troll, wellbred lady -pretty much Del's opposite with her refined ways and proper manners. Yet, I couldn't stop hoping for their relationship to work.

Lots of fun secondary characters including an older lady necromancer with a reanimated mouse named Buttons who communicates with BONGs - very reminiscent of the Death of Rats in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

I enjoyed this a great deal and look forward to reading more of CM Waggoner's books in the future.

What a fun, bawdy, rollicking romp of a read! Complete with Victorian, steampunk vibes, magic and necromancy, lots of hilariously proper cursing, and a sort of city-swashbuckling. Add in some genuine queer romance, an undead mouse skeleton called "Buttons" who "Bongs" forebodingly, and mechanical spider monsters, and this book is one of the greatest and most fun reads I've had in a while. I enjoyed every minute of this book, and the wittiness of the entire thing will make you laugh out loud many times over.

Delly is a petty thief that is hard up for cash. That is until she stumbles upon a job as a body guard for a Lady. What should be two weeks of work and more than enough money for Delly to pay her rent for a few months, turns into quite the adventure. The threats against her charge are real and after fighting a few mechanical spiders, Delly takes charge to avenge and capture those behind the attacks and murders. She may even find love in the process.

Delly is a complex character. She’s vulgar, unrepatriable, with entirely too loose morals. But she’s also loving, caring, and completely motivated by trying to keep her mum out of trouble. She’s basically your typical walking disaster. Honestly, I haven’t enjoyed a character as much, as much as I enjoyed Delly in a while. Her relationship with Winn was a joy to read about, and I really want a second book of the two of them out solving crimes or just trying to plan a vacation, something!

The language in the book at first, takes a bit to get use to. It’s a form of ole’ English with alot of terms specific to this magical world. My only negatives about this book is that I would have like a bit more knowledge around how the magic system works but maybe that is in the first book. I also found it to be a bit long and it’s under 400 pages. While the story itself is pretty fast paced, I thought there was a bit of fluff/extra talk that could have been removed without it impacting the story. Overall though I thoroughly enjoyed this book!

I have not read C.M. Waggoner’s first book Unnatural Magic but I want to now, especially since most reviewers have said they enjoyed Unnatural Magic more than this book. The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry is out in January.

I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry. If you liked this review please let me know either by commenting below or by visiting my instagram @speakingof_books. Huge thank you to Berkley Publishing for my advanced reader copy.

This book was received as an ARC from Berkley Publishing Group in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

At first I was uncertain of what to expect from this book but as I read on, I got the more adventure fantasy vibe from the story and could not stop reading. The unlikely desire to join a band of misfit ladies to undergo the ultimate con artist missions involving the most complicated forms of wizadry (black magic). Delly is definitely a character we can relate to in being unafraid of trouble but when their is a group of ladies all trying to stir up chaos, all hell breaks loose. My hands were shaking at various times throughout the book and all I kept thinking was the fun our teen book club is going to have when we read this book.

We will consider adding this title to our YA collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

Unfortunately for me, this one didn't quite live up to expectation. Its plot staled. Fell flat. It never found the high-flying, suspense-climbing, drip-induced kick a story about a group of mismatched women who combat dangerous magic and mysterious assassins needed. For a while it felt like nothing of consequence had happened. 

I liked the characters well enough, however. Dell, a gutterwitch with a habit of setting things on fire, had lived a tough life. She was a bit stubborn, crass, guarded. Drank in excess. Having bounced around in the grittier parts of town growing up, she simply wanted to earn enough money to pay her rent and send her mother (a drip addict) to a safe, quiet place in the country.

Delly and Winn's romance was cute, interesting given their disparity in social class, if a bit protracted. Their unresolved sexual tension got to be a little tiresome after a while. It dangled too long, which might have something more to do with the sluggishness of the plot than it did with them as a pairing.

Perhaps others will find lots to love in this book, but for me it failed to entice overmuch.

Thank you to NetGalley, Berkley Publishing Group, and Ace for the ARC!

The writing in this one honestly was a little odd and at times, I found it difficult to read. Especially getting into the book, it felt quite like a drag to keep on reading. But the characters were interesting to read about and kept me going.

True rating: 3.5

I loved reading this book! I know it's not technically a series-but it is set in the same world as C.M. Waggoner's first book, Unnatural Magic, but a generation later. And I loved being in this world of magic and trolls again! 

We follow Delly, who is pretty rough and tumble, who gets a pretty well paying job. The catch is that it's for an important lady, which means manners. Oh, and someone is trying to kill her. So that adds to the danger that Delly is facing. 

I loved her relationship with Winn, who's the daughter of 2 of the main characters from Unnatural Magic. Winn is a lady, though not a traditional human lady. So there's a class difference between them. The way that Delly has been raised well, she had certain schemes, but I really enjoyed how their relationship progressed! 

The way it ended, I really enjoyed it. There was always a question of why this was going on, and why this person in particular had done it. I really enjoyed how Delly maneuvered around the obstacles in her path, it made for a very satisfying ending! 

This was another great book by C.M. Waggoner, and I can't wait to read more by her!

Thank you to Netgalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review.
This book was so much fun! I had a great time reading it, and I found the characters compelling and fun to read about from the beginning all the way to the end! I loved the relationship between Delly  and Winn, and I was rooting for them the whole time! 

I clicked on four stars, but really it’s more of a 3.75, and there are a few reasons for that. First, I found some of the language a little bit difficult to follow. It definitely helped add to the characterization of Delly and her peers, but it was difficult for me to understand what they were trying to say. Also the use of “thee” on occasion but not always really threw me off. Along with that, I had some issues with the pacing. It seemed REALLY rushed at the beginning, and then after the first mystery was established, it seemed like they didn’t really do much at all until the very end, and that bothered me a little bit. 
But at the end of the day, it was a delightful read, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to read it before it came out! Once again, the whole “only requesting and reading books I really think I’ll love” has ended up in my favor, and I can’t wait to recommend this to friends.

Delightfully different and completely fun. A recommended first purchase for collections where fantasy is popular.