Claiming the Chess Mistress
Louisa Cornell & Andrea K. Stein
Historical Regency
The loss of Col’s damning journal pages is about to turn deadly;
The forfeit of Charlotte’s closely guarded secrets might destroy her;
Will their mutual quest for justice bring them together, or tear them apart?
By night, she’s a masked chess mistress who challenges and trounces all takers; by day, she’s the ethereal white-blonde beauty who volunteers at the children’s refuge in Seven Dials — Charlotte Smythe lives a luxurious double life of ease as the mysterious chess genius at Goodrum’s House of Pleasure..
After spending years as a gifted investigator extricating others from their peccadillos, dedicated Bow Street runner Archer Colwyn has landed in a suds of his own making. The light-hearted journal of sensual exploits he and his school chums kept while students at Cambridge has gone missing, and the secrets within his particular pages, if revealed, could set off deadly consequences.
The dangerous Captain El Goodrum, proprietress of the most infamous house of pleasure in London, holds the key to their retrieval. In exchange for her cooperation, she demands he run a gauntlet of secrets to deliver a master criminal to justice. His only path to the damning pages is the inscrutable chess mistress who not only resents his attempts to romance away his journal pages, but seems to relish his dread and panic at the prospect of the pages becoming public knowledge.
Charlotte craves the kind of refuge she provides to the orphans she rescues from London’s stews. The respite she seeks away from the world in her St. John’s Wood villa with her two house companions is all that keeps her sane, but sometimes, late at night, she needs something more, something even she cannot name.
Uncaged Review: This book was easily read in a couple hours and it’s a very original storyline that I hadn’t read before. When two writers are penning a book together, it’s always fun to see if I can recognize where one author stops and the other begins, but this is a seamless story. Both our main characters have a past with dark secrets, and both have a lot at stake if either of their pasts comes to light. Charlotte was taken in by Captain El Goodrum, the owner of a house of pleasure, but Charlotte is her chess master. Four nights a week, competitors pay a fee to try to beat Charlotte as she walks among the tables in her disguise.
Col is a highly trained Bow Street Runner who knows Charlotte has possession of his journals from university days, that can endanger not only him, but someone he loves if the pages come to the surface.
What I really liked about this book is that we aren’t reading about members of the ton, or high society regency. We are reading about people that are coming from average backgrounds and are making their own futures. Good spicy storytelling that was original and easy to like. Reviewed by Cyrene
4 Stars
