The Gentleman's Gambit

 The Gentleman's Gambit (The League of Extraordinary Women #4)- Evie Dunmore

Berkley Publishing 

Release Date: December 5, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: Bookish suffragist Catriona Campbell is busy: An ailing estate, academic writer's block, a tense time for England's women's rights campaign--the last thing she needs is to be stuck playing host to her father's distractingly attractive young colleague.

Deeply introverted Catriona lives for her work at Oxford and her fight for women's suffrage. She dreams of romance, too, but since all her attempts at love have ended badly, she now keeps her desires firmly locked inside her head--until she climbs out of a Scottish loch after a good swim and finds herself rather exposed to her new colleague.

Elias Khoury has wheedled his way into Professor Campbell's circle under false pretenses: he did not come to Oxford to classify ancient artefacts, he is determined to take them back to his homeland in the Middle East. Winning Catriona's favor could be the key to his success. Unfortunately, seducing the coolly intense lady scholar quickly becomes a mission in itself and his well-laid plans are in danger of derailing...

Forced into close proximity in Oxford's hallowed halls, two very different people have to face the fact that they might just be a perfect match. Soon, a risky new game begins that asks Catriona one more time to put her heart and wildest dreams at stake.

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I had mixed reactions to this book. Some of it I liked. I liked Catriona and Elias, two people trying to figure out where they belong in the world and how to do what they think is right to the best of their abilities. Catriona is a brilliant linguist and suffragist, she's been trying to find the time to write a book but keeps getting pulled into other people's projects instead. She worries she falls for the sort of person who just wants to take from her, never accept her as she is, and leaves her heartbroken- so when she meets Elias Khoury and feels a familiar spark, she is determined not to fall for him. Elias is charming and brilliant, he has ethics that challenge everything the scholars of Oxford and their collections have never bothered to think about. He knows he shouldn't be attracted to Catriona when he's in England to take back artifacts, but the two definitely have a slow-burn attraction that's hard to avoid. The circling they do is interesting, as each tries to figure the other out, and Catriona tries to figure out her own reactions as well.

I loved the discussions Elias brought up about repatriation and who owns artifacts, and the fact that Catriona and her friends could see this in terms of the suffrage work they'd been doing and see the similarities was a great way to bring the two together. 

The book did drag in places, and while trying to give Catriona and Elias their own bubble for a romance to grow, the rest of the book felt like it suffered as a result. There were ups and downs to it, since they got to know each other better at the same time. By the end, I was frustrated with Catriona not being brave enough to trust Elias and needing a pretty huge grand gesture to fix things (no further details because of spoilers!). I don't know if that was me being frustrated that the book kept on going when it could have ended earlier, or what. In some ways, this book felt like it was crammed with too many things going on, so not everything got the full development it could have. The result was a bit of a flat book for me, but hopefully, others will like it more.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review