Lady's Wager by Mary Spencer

Lady's Wager Reviews

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  Hot Mess Sommelière ~ Caro

  Started and finished in a few hours. A pleasant, if somewhat formulaic Historical Romance Novel.
  
  The Lady's Wager (Jack & Gwendolyn) is the second of three books in the Wager series. First came Dark Wager (Lucien & Clara) and the series ends with The Devil's Wager (Lad Walker).
  
  After reading Dark Wager, which was also pleasant but not really memorable, I hesitated on reading the sequel, even though I bought both books at once.
  
  Lady's Wager features Jack, Earl of Rexley, whose hobby it is to get pregnant endangered prostitutes off the street and into honest work. He is handsome, but other than his charitable exploits, utterly forgettable. We met him in the first book in the series, in which he did not leave much of an impression on me.
  
  Gwendolyn was actually a great heroine. She was a dutz who got in trouble, but also a confident and shameless flirt, which was quite entertaining. Her character traits were actually quite memorable in themselves, although her background story, which was hardly related at all, was not.
  
  The main plot actually involved child sex slave trafficking. Even though that's a hard subject that's bound to upset people, the book shies away from the brutality of what this really means. The hero gets to be the white vested, never failing savior - something that few can achieve in reality, even with funds and station.
  
  The romance: I admire Gwennie's drive to conquest. Really I do. She could have made a grand character in a long running family saga. Unfortnately she was stranded in a genre that only allows a certain amount of pages, kisses and personality. Mary Spencer tried her best. Her heroine is very interesting and spirited, and with a few hundred pages more this could have been an amazing love story. In these constraints, with a lot of nice-washing, we only got the PG version, which is much shorter, less dramatic, and 3 stars instead of 5. Sad.