Ostensibly, the protagonists of this book are Georgina Wilcox, daughter of a Black coal merchant, and Mark Sebastian, youngest son of the influential and very racist Duke of Prahmn. She, already an outcast due to the color of her skin, her late father’s profession and some complicated family history, and he, the spare-to-the-spare and a perennial disappointment to his father, must work together to assuage the scandal stemming from being caught in compromising circumstances, before their reputations are permanently damaged.

However, as this novel is the beginning of a series that follows a battle of wills between the Duke of Torrance and the widowed Lady Hampton, eldest of the four Wilcox sisters, there is a lot of page space devoted to both their past history–because of course there’s history there–and their current corrosive enmity.

Beware: racism; domestic abuse; alcoholism; stillbirth; chronic illness (sickle cell disease); gambling addiction.

The novel is narrated in first person, past tense, mostly by Mark and Georgina, although there are a couple of key chapters from the Duke of Torrance’s point of view. In fact, most of the history between the duke, the late Lord Hampton, and Katherine, the latter’s widow, is set before the reader in chapter 3 (more on this below).

Once upon a time, the Wilcox coal business had provided a comfortable living and helped establish the family’s respectability; the Wilcox sisters received educations comparable to those of gentlewomen, and the family lived in comfort and security. Then the eldest got pregnant out of wedlock, and though there was a stillbirth, the damage to all their reputations was done. A few years later, she married the white son of a viscount, partly in hopes that his connections would help them regain their lost social standing; instead, his unbridled gambling cost them most everything, and his recent death has left the Wilcox sisters without any protection from the white society that has resented a Black family’s prosperity for decades.

The only redeeming act in the late unlamented Lord Hampton’s life was to send for his erstwhile closest friend from his deathbed, knowing that once the duke learned the truth, he would protect the Wilcoxes. After all, Torrance has always loved Katherine, and would never let her resentment deter him from keeping her and her sisters safe.

For the next year, the duke does just that, quietly working behind the scenes to thwart the machinations of white aristocrats such as the Marquis of Prahmn–a man with whom Torrance himself has an account to settle–who want to take them uppity Black women who dared to marry up, down all the way to the gutter. Over this time, he earns the younger sisters’ trust and affection, even though the widowed Lady Hampton still despises him and resents his help.

When Georgina, the second eldest of the Wilcox sisters, impulsively kisses a stranger during a somewhat public event at his house, the duke’s careful strategy seems in danger of falling apart. A bold plan to deceive society and defang the gossip is set in place: the two people involved will fake a temporary engagement while working to make Georgina a socially desirable wife over the next few weeks. Once she has other viable options, she will publicly break the engagement. (More on this in a bit.)

In his late twenties at this point, Lord Mark Sebastian has no money of his own and is entirely dependent on her mother’s connections to get commissions as a music tutor or helping wealthy families design music rooms for their estates or town houses; he aspires to make a name for himself as a composer, thus finally becoming financially independent from the father who despises him.

While he is clearly quite talented, Mark often struggles to translate the music in his head to paper notations; for several years he has failed to finish a piece of music in time to enter it into a prestigious contest where, should he win, the purse and the public recognition would go a long way to securing his future. And then there’s the paralysing shyness that often leaves him mute in social situations–especially but not only when interacting with attractive women.

For years, Mark has been infatuated, almost obsessed, with the portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle (historical figure, extant painting), and he’s captivated by Georgina’s resemblance to her; this fascination eventually helps him break through his shyness and social anxiety enough to talk to her.

Georgina Wilcox is 25; given that the family can no longer afford servants, she has learned to bake (and presumably also to cook, though this is not mentioned at any point in the novel). In fact, we are told often that her biscuits (cookies for U.S. readers) are absolutely amazing, and there’s a little subplot involving Mark never being in time to snag even one to taste.

For quite a bit of the book, Georgina’s behavior is that of a much younger person. Whenever she is stressed, she runs–literally. It is during one of these flights after an argument with Katherine that the infamous kissing happens, in fact.

While the Wilcox sisters love each other dearly, there are several undercurrents of resentment in their relationships. Katherine’s marriage to a feckless gambler has cost her sisters their dowries, which has essentially condemned all to spinsterhood, never mind that it also means that they now live in genteel poverty; the fact that he was white and titled has also provoked enough racist backlash as to endanger what little of their father’s coal business survived the late Viscount’s gambling is added insult to injury.

Georgina is impulsive and has zero interest to help her sister run what’s left of the coal business–she runs, twirls, bakes, hums, and occasionally plays their later mother’s pianoforte (which somehow didn’t get sold to pay gambling debts). Scarlet, all of twenty, is so interested in science that she often dresses like a man to attend lectures at the Royal Society–which means that she frequently disappears from the house for hours at a time, and apparently Katherine never notices this. Lydia, just five, has a recurring illness–the same affliction that killed Mrs Wilcox. (We learn through the author’s note at the end that sickle cell anemia runs in the family, which historically affected mostly Black people of African descent–including some white-passing individuals.)

And then there are the secrets the eldest Wilcox continues to keep from her sisters.

The novel deals with a lot of heavy issues; the racism and politics of the early 1800s are showcased both individually in the person of the Marquis of Prahmn, and in the unutterably horrid cartoons about Georgina and Mark that soon appear in the popular rags (the author names the historical cartoonists of the time that inspired the ones described in the book).

Mark is clearly written to be somewhere in the autism spectrum; he struggled with speech as a child, and is still often not comfortable holding conversations, occasionally going involuntarily non-verbal in stressful circumstances. He gets lost in his own thoughts often, which leads him to miss entire conversations–this is how he finds himself in the duke’s garden in time to kiss Georgina, and how he fails to realize the depth of his mother’s racism for so long.

Speaking of the marchioness, she is portrayed as a fully dimensional person, for all that she has little page space. While she holds the same racist views as most white people of her time–especially those whose families had owned slaves until fairly recently–and often acts out of a degree of self-interest when it comes to encouraging Mark to distance himself from “the Blackamoor woman”, she’s also shown to love her son deeply, and her suffering under the emotionally abusive marquis is treated with compassion and sympathy.

There is so much focus on the conflict between Katherine and the duke, and on the conflicts between Georgina and Katherine, between Mark and his family, and between Mark and his friend Livingston, that there’s not enough space to develop the relationship between the putative leads.

In fact, I was never fully convinced of the emotional connection between Mark and Georgina, though I appreciated that her reluctance to go from a short fake engagement to a true relationship with him is based on realistic concerns. After all, she already lived through the societal response to her sister’s interracial marriage to a member of the aristocracy, never mind that they are both essentially penniless.

And while it’s is clear, even without the note at the end, that the author did a lot of research on the period, from scientific discoveries to the social and political climate of the time, and while the feeling of the period–misogyny, racism, the power differential between the classes, etc–is very much there, I felt that the way most of the historical figures and discoveries were introduced into the narrative by the characters was forced, and that it often jolted me out of the story.

The author’s choice to reveal so much of the history between Torrance and Katherine made several conversations between Katherine and Georgina redundant, killing the narrative momentum. In fact, there was quite a lot of repetition of known facts, and not in conversations with different characters, but between the same two people. Katherine and Georgina fight half a dozen times over the former’s reason to reject the duke’s offers of help; Mark and Livingston discuss the facts behind the latter’s almost hysterical rejection of marriage for every man he likes–which includes Mark and the duke–something like four different times.

And while it’s true that actual human interaction involves a lot of this kind of going around in circles, fiction has to make sense where reality rarely does.

Which brings me back to the whole fake engagement, and later the famous wager between the duke and Katherine, over marrying off the younger Wilcox sisters. The former would make some sense if the plan was to have the happy couple spend time in public, attending social functions, having the duke introduce them to some of his own acquaintances, in order to showcase whatever is supposed to make Georgina a desirable wife, rather than a “grasping, opportunistic Blackamoor bent on seducing a naïve white aristocrat” (as Katherine has been perceived by white society since her own marriage).

Instead, the plan is to have Georgina “exhibit” (the word the author uses for “perform”) at the ball: she will sing a hymn while Mark plays, and this will, somehow, elicit enough obvious interest from other single men in attendance that she will publicly end their “secret” fake engagement, then…something something, all is well for them both.

As Mark and Georgina have their own push-pull over this, what with him already head over heels within minutes of their meeting, and her thinking to herself around the half point of the book that she loves him–never mind they’ve barely spent any time in each other’s company—the duke and Katherine have the fight to end all fights, and the famous wager comes into being.

Which, as it happens, makes even less sense than the fake engagement.

There were other issues; having the man of all work, whose English, we are told, “wasn’t the best”, making references to Greek mythology, with perfect grammar, in the same scene felt off. Stressing that Mr Thom is their only servant, who they often can’t pay for weeks at a time, but never referencing essential and time-consuming housework chores, such as cooking, laundry, or hauling water up for the oft-referenced baths young Lydia doesn’t want to take, made the Wilcoxes’ poverty less real.

Also, and perhaps this is a case of the Mandela effect, the familiarity with which the servants treat their employers in this book was jarring; I can understand it from Mr Thom, as the Wilcox fortune rose and fell within his own service to the family, and even somewhat from the duke’s butler due to that nobleman’s personal history, but it felt out of place from the Marquis of Prahmn’s butler, as that aristocrat is clearly very class conscious and intolerant.

Finally, the same editing issues I noted in my review of Murder in Westminster are present in this ARC: several instances where words are clearly missing, or the wrong one is used (face for gaze, plane for plain, and so on); the Marquis of Prahmn being referred to as a duke at least once; slight jumps in action, so that characters are in one place or position in one sentence, and somewhere else in the next; etc.

Further, in the scene where the duke talks with the soon-to-die Viscount Hampton, the latter essentially says, “This is how I destroyed your life, and also the full details of my perfidy are in that letter over there”. After he promptly dies, there’s no mention of the letter ever again–even though the scene is narrated in first person by the duke himself. (I will note here that perhaps some of the details of the letter are important later on in the series, and therefore the author didn’t want to include its full text in this novel; there are other ways to keep the letter’s contents from the reader.)

So while the novel had an intriguing premise and promising characters, and while I appreciate the author building a nineteenth century Britain that is as diverse in every way as the historical one was, I struggled with too many aspects of the story, and in the end wasn’t convinced that Georgina and Mark love each other.

A Gamble at Sunset therefore gets a 7.00 out of 10

Betting Against the Duke #1
A Gamble at Sunset
by Vanessa Riley

I love the concept behind A Gamble at Sunset and it hits a bunch of sweet spots in historical fiction. The music element caught my attention right away. Georgina Wilcox is an intriguing heroine and the catalyst moment that drives her story into a fake courtship is wonderful.

The hero Lord Mark Sebastian is great in that he’s a composer and they have the love of music drawing them together. His interest in preserving Georgina’s reputation speaks volumes.

In the first few chapters I had a hard time dropping into the story and actually had to go back and reread them to keep track of all the pieces at play. A lot happens in those chapters and there are also a lot of characters to keep track of.

I really appreciated the attention to detail and the interest in historical accuracy. The four Wilcox sisters have realistic relationships and I liked how they interacted. Plus the backdrop of the Wilcox sisters’ financial precarious coal business and the half Black Russian Duke brings lots of dimensions to the story and sets up the series as well.

Thank you to NetGalley, and the Kensington Publishing imprint Zebra for an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

A historical romance series centered around a bet? I'm immediately in! I really enjoyed reading about the Wilcox sisters and liked Georgie and Mark's connection.

My favorite part of this story is Katherine and the Duke's connection. I already need their book and I know it's still two books away! I really love a series where we get to see a connection develop throughout the series. I liked Mark and Georgie's connection also but I wished we had gotten to see them connect a bit more. I felt like particularly Mark was attracted to Georgie but maybe didn't know her super well.

Another aspect of the story I loved was how Vanessa Riley wove the real history of black people in regency Victorian England into her characters. I learned a lot about a part of history that I haven't heard talked about much.

I am definitely hooked on this series and will be interested in reading the next two! Scarlet is also a great character and I'm interested to see her find a partner as well!

I found this book to be extremely confusing. We were introduced to too many characters too quickly. It was difficult to tell them apart. This made it difficult to follow the storyline. I wanted to like it.

Georgina Wilcox is one of four sisters who inherited their father’s coal business. She is a wallflower with hidden musical talents & enters into a fake betrothal with Lord Mark Sebastian after being caught in a passionate embrace. The third son of an influential marquis, the tongue-tied Mark is determined to keep the scandal from ruining Georgina’s reputation and his own prospects of winning the celebrated Harlbert’s Prize for music.
The start of a new series & a well written, well researched book which I enjoyed but didn’t love as I would have liked more chemistry between Mark & Georgina, their characters had depth but just lacked that extra something
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book; all thoughts and opinions are my own

Fake dating is one of my favorite tropes. So I was extremely excited to read A Gamble at Sunset. I really enjoyed the sisters and how each of them were so unique and all just wanted what was best for their family.

I however thought the book focused too much on Katherine when Georgina should have been more of the forerunner since this book was about her romance and finding love.

I kind of wish we would have gotten Katherine's storyline first which would have given a lot more context into why she was the way she was in this book.

I'm not really sure how I feel about Mark as at times I felt his relationship for Georgina was more like a fetish since he obessed so much over Dido Elizabeth Belle.

I do feel this one will be a hit for historical romance fans as it has all the elements that make for a intriguing historical romance!

While the storyline of the book remains the same from beginning to end, I felt that the plot was confusing and not very organized. I typically love this genre and multiple points of view, but the execution lacked and left me disappointed.

I was excited to get my ARC copy, and began my read with great expectations. What drew me in was the cover .
Initially, I read this story, I had difficulty in keeping the storyline of the characters straight, I would have to flipp back to check in.
One of the biggest things I appreciate is that things were left open; not every thing was explained which spurned me on to continue reading. The latter as resulted in me falling in love with the week constructed characters

First person narrative from the perspective of the two main characters. It is an excellent tale with several elements like love, betrayal, pride, prejudicism, racism, mixed race relationships, hypocrisy, friendships, family, loyalty, the pursuit of knowledge. Music plays a center role as well. There is also the age old struggle to choose one’s happiness vs society’s expectations vs repercussions for one’s actions. I love the historical background at the end of the book as well as the bonus recipe!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Vanessa Riley for providing me with a complimentary digital ARC for A Gamble at Sunset coming out May 21, 2024. The honest opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I was really excited to receive this book! I’ve read Murder in Westminster and loved it. Murder Mysteries are definitely one of my favorite genres. This book definitely has a different vibe than that one. This is more romance based. I love the regency era setting. The whole fake dating is fun in any time period, so I enjoyed the hijinks that ensued. I just love wallflower stories. I loved the writing. It was definitely heavy on the dialogue, which is my favorite style. It felt a lot like Queen Charlotte and other regency books I’ve read. I felt like a couple of the characters weren’t as developed, so I’m hoping they’ll be featured more in the rest of the series. I’ll definitely check out more books by this author.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys diverse historical romances!

"When a duke discovers the woman he loves was tricked into marrying another, the master chess player makes the now-widowed Viscountess the highest-stakes wager of his life in a last-ditch effort to win her affection: he will find husbands for her two sisters—or depart forever..."Georgina and Mark were meant to be together. I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley. This in no way affects my opinion of this book.

I wanted to really enjoy this one, because it did have such an interesting plot. But I could not get past the characters or the writing. Unfortunately, the characters were rather one-dimensional and never fully fleshed out, except perhaps the duke. I felt the writing and the dialogue was messy and didn’t fully come together.

This is a great read. The plot is well written and the storyline is interesting and keeps your attention. I am looking forward to next book in this series.

This was not a typical historical fiction and it was really hard to get into. I may have to try a different book by this author, sadly this one was not it for me.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Normally, this is my go to happy genre. This book...was not. So many moving parts were happening in this book that just didn't need to be, the romance was lackluster. The focus of the book was on a sonata that then couldn't even be used for the goal. Overall, it was just a busy read that I had to force myself through and I was very disappointed.

The first book in a new trilogy….A Gamble at Sunset is about the Wilcox sisters who are Black and living in Regency England. Like Bridgerton, this version of time and place has Black member of the “haute ton” and nobility. But not all member of society approve of their multicultural world and especially dislike mixed race couples. The Wilcox’s father built a lucrative coal empire from scratch which left the sisters wealthy. Unfortunately, the oldest sister Katherine married a Viscount with a gambling addiction and most of their money and business is gone. Now a young widow, Vicountess Katherine must rebuild the coal business and provide for her 3 younger sisters. Enter the Duke of Torrence, who will do anything to help the Wilcox sisters but as Katherine’s former love who she believes abandoned her with child years before, her meets with great resistance from her. In an effort to will her back, Torrence provides huge dowries for the 2 middle sister and works hard to find them suitable husbands. Thru a series of rash decisions, Georgiana (sister #2) becomes fake engaged to Lord Mark….the 3rd son of a Marquis. Mark falls in love with Georgie but his father is a belligerent racist and Georgie is very reticent to marry after watching her former brother-in-law bankrupt the family and make her older sister miserable. I enjoyed th e story and will read the next book in the series. I did, however, feel the the dialogue, especially in the beginning of the book, was not a tight as it could have been and felt a little haphazard.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley and am voluntarily posting a review. All opinions are my own.
Vanessa Riley returns to historical romance with A Gamble at Sunset, the first in the Betting Against the Duke series. This new series promises to be rather high-concept, both setting up an overarching plot for the series and including a self-contained romance, which I felt was a somewhat double-edged sword in places here.
Vanessa Riley is well-known at this point for her historical research into Black people in Britain, but I love how she continues to surprise with little nuggets of research highlighting how small the world was and is. The lore of her narrative is based on some characters who are descended from the eighteenth century Russian nobleman Gannibal, who was a former enslaved person who ended up being adopted by Peter the Great. And while the characters in the book are fictional, Gannibal truly does have descendants in the British aristocracy, including the modern-day Unicorn Hot Duke, Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster and George Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven (cousin of Queen Elizabeth II).
But all this lore is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. That’s not to say that there’s not good stuff here, but there’s so much going on that it all feels half-baked. The romance is cute, for example, and gave me similar vibes to Bridgerton book and season 1 but if the dynamics were flipped, with the compromising position occurring before the fake courtship. And Georgina and Mark are nice characters who do have solid chemistry.
But they also share page time with all these other characters, namely Georgina’s sister and the Duke, and what I think will be their overarching plotline over the series, that no one felt well-defined and like they “stuck” with me. The stakes for Georgina and Mark weren’t there, and thus, the whole book fell a little flat.
I am still cautiously optimistic about this series, and will probably read the next to see how the story progresses. But while it was a bit of a letdown, I do recommend it if you’re looking for a well-researched historical romance with Black characters.

DNF. I don't know if i will pick this one up at another time, but i found it to be a bit all over the place within the first 3 chapters. Maybe i'll try something different by this author and compare.

Thank you to Netgalley for the DRC!

"Joy must defeat the darkness."

Vanessa Riley breathes life into a diverse cast of characters in this creative take on a regency era romance and fake dating.

The Wilcox sisters inherited their father's successful coal business, but when the oldest, Katherine, marries she gains not only a title, but the debts accumulated by the man's follies until his untimely death. Luckily a duke, with whom Katherine and her late husband have a past, swoops in to keep the sisters from ruin. Until Georgina Wilcox kisses Mark Sebastian, a would be composer from a well to do family, to vex Katherine, but the wrong people see. They decide to fake court until other prospects present themselves and Georgina can politely end the engagement. Meanwhile Mark is actually in love with her. Regency shenanigans ensue!

Georgina is lovely and has a whimsy that's irresistible. I don't blame Mark in the least for being instantly intrigued by her. There are prejudices which rear their ugly heads and regency sensibilities which can be frustrating ,but our delightful couple gets through them. Plenty of surprises are weaved into the narrative.

4 Stars! Thank you, to the publisher, for this eARC via Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion!

This is the first Vanessa Riley novel I have read and I cannot wait to explore more of her other works! A Gamble at Sunset was a really great read and I enjoyed reading about Georgina and Mark’s love story. I appreciated the character development and friendship between the two and all the supporting characters. The end of the novel left me wanting more so I cannot wait to see how the story continues. I loved the historical lens that the author decided to take and it brought me out of the reading slump I was in. Overall, a sort of marriage of convenience, friends to lovers hybrid situation and lots of great interactions!

Thank you, Kensington Publishing, for this eARC via Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion! If you are into historical fiction/romance, I'd recommend this to you - I will definitely be recommending this to my community.