Fiction Reviews
The Gentleman And His Vowsmith
(2025) Rebecca Ide, Tor, £22, hrdbk, viii + 449pp, ISBN 978-1035-05288-2
Regency Romance. Gothic Whodunnit. Clockpunk and more than a touch of magic. There’s a lot for the author to juggle in The Gentleman And His Vowsmith, never mind the reader, and it’s to Rebecca Ide’s credit that she keeps it all on track.
Our protagonist Lord Nicholas Monterris is the noble heir to a great magical name, but his family’s financial difficulties have kept him far from Court, at their crumbling ducal seat in Northumberland.
While Nic is a kindly soul and beloved of his eccentric mother and his valet, he is a disappointment to his magical martinet of a father, the Duke of Vale. Unable to secure his father’s approval or leave the county, he contents himself with wine, unsuitable men and his hobby of building toy automata.
The story opens as the Duke arranges his son’s betrothal to bookish Lady Leaf Serral, daughter of a rival family, as a joint solution to his cash flow problems and to ensuring the continuation of the Monterris line.
So far, so Regency Romance, more or less.
But the union of two great magical families requires extensive negotiations involving a particular brand of sorcerer: the vowsmith. As fate would have it, the vowsmith the Serrals have chosen to represent them is Dashiell sa Vere, Nic’s childhood friend and lost teenage love.
Tradition also has it that both parties closet themselves away until the business is concluded and the marriage contract signed. So the cordially despised Serrals plus Master Vowsmith sa Vere descend upon Nic’s hastily refurbished family home Monterris Court to be ceremonially locked in for an extended stay.
This all goes about as well as can be expected even before the first dead body turns up.
Nic and Leaf make common cause as investigators, encountering rogue clockwork figures and unexpected magics in the unused rooms of the vast mansion. Meanwhile tensions rise between the two families thrust together by necessity, and between Nic and Dashiell, who very much have unfinished business together.
I was braced for The Gentleman and His Vowsmith to be something of disappointment. As a Georgette Heyer fan I appreciate it takes a lot of work to make Regency Romance seem as effortless as it should and I was worried this novel with all its genre-hopping would be something of a hot mess.
I am pleased to report that this is not the case and moreover that I enjoyed this story a great deal. Nic, Leaf and Dashiell are all characters to warm to, and the detective-story structure keeps everything moving along nicely, leading to a satisfying resolution. It’s not quite effortless – keeping a lightness of touch going alongside a murder mystery, some racy encounters between Nic and Dash and the bickering of two dysfunctional families requires a lot of tonal dexterity – but it’s certainly smooth enough.
Author Rebecca Ide also gets round a lot of the potential world-building pitfalls in her literary mash-up by keeping the story and the cast almost entirely in a single location. This also allows her to share just enough about vowsmithing as a magical technique to make it sound plausible as a profession without having to ask too many searching questions about a magical contract economy.
Locking everyone in order to negotiate the marriage and solve the murders is also obviously a huge contrivance, but if it was good enough for Agatha Christie back then, it’s certainly acceptable here and now.
I very much enjoyed The Gentleman And His Vowsmith – please do investigate further if you enjoy any of the subgenres being blended here.
Tim Atkinson
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