kirkusreviews.com
A self-made businessman who wants to climb the social ladder
agrees to help a lady inventor find funding in return for her matchmaking
skills in early Victorian London.
On a rainy night in Belgravia, inventor Diana Ashby is late for
a scientific lecture when she spots an altercation in the alleyway. She manages
to scare off two ruffians with her umbrella only to find herself looking up at
a very attractive gentleman. Aidan Iverson is a wealthy self-made investor and
part owner of Duke’s Den, a gentlemen’s gambling club that also functions as a
Victorian version of Shark Tank.
Abandoned to a workhouse as a child, he is determined to discover his true
parentage while at the same time finding a well-born bride whose social status
can raise his own. Diana and Aidan strike a deal: She, a well-connected
baronet’s granddaughter, will find him a match, while Aidan will locate an
investor for her manual vacuum cleaner. Diana is under pressure to make her own
match, but an investor could help her family’s finances just as much and
without forcing her to forsake her one true passion in life. Aidan and Diana
are both intelligent, tenacious, and driven. Neither seeks love or marriage for
its own sake, but as they spend time together, their own romance blossoms, and
their goals shift. The nobleman’s gambling den has been overdone in historical
romance, although here the plot rests on technology and commercialization in England
in the years leading up to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Readers will need to
overlook Diana’s unusual, and unexplained, amount of unchaperoned freedom. When
Aidan admits, “I’ve never known where I belong,” he could be speaking for Diana
as well. This is the second book in Carlyle’s Duke’s Den series, after A
Duke Changes Everything.
Mature, interesting, and romantic protagonists elevate a
familiar story.
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