A review by cakt1991
A Gamble at Sunset by Vanessa Riley

3.0

 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.