One part locked-room murder mystery, one part forbidden romance, The Gentleman and His Vowsmith is an intriguing Regency-era historical fantasy. Nic Monterris, the only heir of the Monterris dukedom, is to be married to Lady Leaf Serral, the daughter of his father’s greatest rival. Marriage contracts are negotiated in a locked-in as a part of the tradition of magic users and are overseen by magic lawyers called vowsmiths. However, there are two problems with this arrangement: first is a spree of mysterious deaths amid members of the locked-in household, and the second is the presence of Dashiell sa Vare, the vowsmith for the Serral family and the boy he fell in love with as a young man who left him one day without a word. Thus ensues a fascinating magical murder mystery, the yearning of a love thought lost, and a deep and compelling friendship between Nic and Leaf. Overall, The Gentlemand and His Vowsmith is an enjoyable read full of interesting twists, characters you can’t help but root for, and an unimaginable amount of family drama; however, this book struggles a bit with pacing and explaining its interesting world.

I sincerely enjoyed this book. Nic is a fun character—the only heir to a failing dukedom, he has always known that his only way out of a fate that cages him is death. The estate is crumbling, and marred with mysterious deaths and tales of ghosts who haunt the halls. His friendship with Lady Leaf, a fiercely independent, strong-willed, and intelligent woman, is a driving force of the novel. It’s clear from the beginning that they will never fall in love, no matter what a marriage contract says—yet, instead of being resentful of the other’s presence in their lives, they form a quick friendship based on mutual understanding and respect. It’s fun to see two characters so supportive of each other even under such circumstances. Nic’s tension with Dashiell is equally interesting, as the pair reckon with the social forces which kept them apart for so long, and the looming threat of murders in their very house forcing them to question whether or not to rekindle what they had. The book is a fun read due to its interesting characters, and the overall mystery plot is equally compelling. The enmity between the two families is uncovered piece by piece, full of drama and emotions. If you like Regency-era mystery, interesting characters, and a bit of a fantasy magic system mixed in, you’ll probably like this book.

This book struggled in two areas. First is the pacing: as much as I enjoyed this book, it felt like an incredibly long book to read in a way that I’m not sure it needed to. The book dragged in the first half especially, and while I was never bored, it did feel like it moved quite slowly. The second area is the magic system: I really enjoyed a magic system based heavily on law, sigils, and tradition, but the rules of the system are never really explained to the reader. Even the definition of vowsmith is difficult to glean; never mind the other areas of magic (Conjuring, etc) which seem to be different but are not really defined either. There’s a Guild that oversees the magic, though I don’t quite know what they do; Brilliance, the capacity to do magic, is inherited with people having different capacities for it but what this means for the class system isn’t really discussed; I don’t know what professions a magic user might have other than vowsmithing; Nic seems to have a strange capacity for sensing magic though it’s unclear if this is something viewed as unusual by others or not. While I enjoy naturalistic storytelling which conveys the rules of the world through plot rather than through description, I felt this book didn’t communicate the magic system in a way that allowed me to understand its implications in the overall murder mystery.

In the end, I’m giving this book 4 out of 5 stars. I sincerely did enjoy it, even if I feel it would have been a stronger read with better pacing and a bit more explanation of the magic system.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.