A Lady's Handbook to Gadgets and Guile by Angela Bell

A Lady's Handbook to Gadgets and Guile
by Angela Bell

ISBN-13: 9780764242144
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Bethany House
Released: July 7, 2026

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
London, England, 1895. Ambulatory wheelchair user Margaret Kingsley secretly crafts gadgets for the Daughters of Genius Society, a covert team of lady inspectors disguised as harmless bluestocking spinsters. While her fellow inspectors gallivant about London solving crimes, Margaret has been perfectly content assisting from the sidelines--until her expertise is needed to infiltrate the domain of London's most prolific inventor, Alvan T. Harrison.

Charles Noble sacrificed his career as a musician to support his family after his father's stroke. Now he balances ledgers as a secretary by day and tends his disabled father by night, until taking a temporary job as event coordinator for a famous inventor commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his mechanical empire. As strange occurrences surface, Charles's event planning collides with Margaret's case, and the pair must investigate the inventor's legacy while attraction sparks between them.


My Review:
A Lady's Handbook to Gadgets and Guile is a fantasy romance supposedly set in 1895 in England. The author made little effort to explain how things worked. Margaret and her father were geniuses, so of course their inventions worked. Somehow. Just don't look to hard. Some of the inventions made no sense: a steam-engine-powered vacuum? Do you actually understand how steam engines work, author? And the umbrella that could lift multiple people didn't appear to have a power source. Even people's attitudes and the technology available to everyone reflected much more modern times, so it didn't feel remotely historical to me.

Charles really saw Margaret and thought her beautiful and smart. His own father had struggles due to a stroke, so Charles understood her situation somewhat and honestly didn't feel like a life spent with her would be a burden. It's a sweet, fun romance that developed as they worked to solve the mystery. Well, the patent thief was pretty obvious. It was more about collecting the evidence needed to prove the case in a court of law.I liked their relationship.

The author spent a lot of time developing how Margaret suffered a severe injury to her back which left her in constant pain. Sometimes she's too tired to do anything, other times she could carefully dole out her energy. Her back also spasmed painfully when compressed (like a corset), after certain movements, etc. This sounds like a 'you can't push through it' injury that restricts what you can do. Yet, of course, we have her wearing a corset as a disguise (like the self-powered wheelchair doesn't give her away!) and still able to function. These back spasms were so bad it took up to an hour just to get out of bed, yet by the end she's doing things that would hurt a fully able-bodied woman with a great back. No real consequences beyond now being able to wake up to hanky-panky with her husband rather than an hour of pain getting out of bed. I wish that's the way things worked.

Margaret worshiped God with music when in pain. Both she and Charles found soul-healing in music and trusted God. There was no sex or bad language.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.