With ‘The Gentleman’s Gambit,’ Evie Dunmore checkmates her beloved series in a way worthy of the quartet.

If finishing a book is considered an achievement, completing a series should automatically earn an author an award, especially when they are able to tie up their tale with a bow worthy of all the characters they created. For Evie Dunmore, author of the beloved 'A League Of Extraordinary Women' series, the challenge lay in page time. Her now concluded quartet of novels can technically be read as standalone stories as each centers around one woman in a Victorian-era friend group. Sure, you may miss some of the brilliantly woven nuances if you choose to forgo Dunmore's published order, but you would likely still find each book enjoyable on its own. The only problem with setting up a sequence that can function in this fashion is that it allows readers to become significantly attached to each of the characters. And thus, when things draw to a close, it makes them expect more than just a typical tale. The final book will be seen as an homage to each book that has come before whilst also needing to maintain a full and flushed-out story for the crowning protagonist. Something Evie does with grace and wit that would make her four suffragists proud, especially Catriona Campbell, the focus of her latest novel, The Gentleman's Gambit.