A Touch of Steele is the final book in Cathy Maxwell’s The Gambler’s Daughters series and focuses on Gwendolyn Lanscarr, who is resisting her sisters’ efforts to get her married. The reason?  She’s already in love with Beckett Steele, a shadowy investigator who lives in the margins of Regency London. 

The opening line is a cracker – “He’d asked for the oldest whore in the house.” But it’s not what you think – after a war injury, Beckett has been dreaming about his mother and, believing he spent his early years in a brothel, he’s looking for stories about her. He knows his father is the Marquess of Middlebury, who funded his schooling but wanted nothing to do with his bastard son.

Back in Ireland (and in an earlier book in the series), Beckett had helped Gwendolyn to win at cards so she could fund a London Season for her sisters. Because of that help, Gwendolyn owes Beckett a favour, and as he wants to infiltrate the Middlebury home, he finagles her an invitation to play whist at a house party at the family seat. Gwendolyn provides an entrée for Beckett so he can confront the Marquess about his parentage and find out who his mother was.

Things move quickly once Gwendolyn and Beckett get to Middlebury, both with the search for information about Beckett’s mother, and the romance. Gwendolyn is fabulous – feisty and firey, smart and brave and so curious. She’s bursting to know everything about Beckett, and says that this is the most excitement she’s ever had in her life – which of course means she underestimates the dangers. She’s not silly though, and she helps Beckett as often as she gets in the way. He, on the other hand, is a pretty standard Regency tortured hero who thinks himself unworthy of Gwendolyn, but luckily for them, he swiftly realises how good they are together.

Even with their difficult backstories, the overall tone is light hearted, and there’s comic relief from the secondary characters, particularly Gwendolyn’s whist partner Lady Orpington and her spaniel, Magpie. The pacing is swift as Gwendolyn and Beckett gallop through the family clues, whist games, horse rides, a kidnapping, mysteries and banter. 

Unfortunately the writing is uneven, with paragraphs full of short sentences that make the prose feel choppy and do nothing to enhance the story, although other parts are carefully crafted. These inconsistencies stopped me from really settling into the story.

If you’ve read the other two books in this series and want to know what happens with Gwendolyn and Beckett, then you might want to pick up A Touch of Steele – but I can’t really recommend it otherwise. There are more engaging novels by Cathy Maxwell.