A review by tessisreading2
Luck Is No Lady by Amy Sandas

3.0

Oddly, despite the fact that I found the writing somewhat stilted, the book's plot and characters were enough to keep me speeding forward. Of course it takes place in a never-neverland of history (of course the gently-bred heroine decides to pay off her father's debts by working as a bookkeeper in a gaming house!) but it was just... fun, and not terribly upsetting in any way; nobody seemed particularly menacing and most people were generally nice.

Then the second part of the book happened, in which
Spoilerthe heroine waited until the last possible minute to accumulate the money to pay her father's debt because of course she couldn't accept a loan from the hero, with whom she is already in love and with whom she will eventually have sex despite their not being married; and the man who holds the debt gets impatient, kidnaps the heroine's younger sister, and sells her to a brothel. It's clearly a set-up for book two in the series but it upset and infuriated me, because I really don't like "virgin gets sold to a brothel" novels and the usual tone of such books - dark, menacing, sexy - does not at all match what this book was like. I thought I was reading a light regency romance about a spinster who likes math finding love with a base-born millionaire and all of a sudden the heroine's sister is getting abducted, drugged, and sold off to be raped. Yeah. The consequences of pretty much everything in this book were so light (no one gets ruined, no one is really chaperoned properly, even the villain is given a sympathetic motivation for collecting on his debt, etc.) that this came like a bolt out of nothing. (As a side note, I will be absolutely horrified if the villain is redeemed in a later novel; the set-up of his sympathetic reasoning seemed to be aimed in that direction. Right up until the abduction/selling to a brothel bit.)
I won't be continuing the series.