I enjoyed the chase!

Successful lawyer Jacob Baker and now newly minted earl Jacob Ashland, the Earl of Ashland and his friend, Oliver McCaron, the Earl of Armbruster are intrigued by crimes and have a pastime of solving and dissecting crimes. They have weekly "Mayhem Meeting, as they liked to call it, where they perused the newspapers looking for the most sensational crimes and tried to solve them while drinking copious amounts of port."
Apparently successfully as their friend Detective O'Leary occasionally joined them. "They were a strange trio—the earl, the solicitor, and the detective. Although ... there were now two earls and a detective."
Currently, a spate of heinously disturbing crimes had come to light; servant girls were being brutally killed and dismembered and London working folk were panicked.
But with the rescue by Jacob of a young boy from being trampled by a horse that armchair sleuthing becomes more serious.
When a young gentle woman, an orphan seeks help from Jacob, he puts forward the idea of a marriage of convenience as protection for her and a buffer from marriage seeking young women and their mothers for him. Charlotte has run from an arranged marriage by her aunt and guardian to her much disliked and disturbing cousin Edmund.
Against her better judgement Charlotte accepts the marriage proposal, hoping that dangerous supposition she has about the servant girls' deaths won't bring disaster to them both.
Putting together the trope of young woman in disguise, evil relatives and a marriage of convenience works well in this first in a new series by Cullen.

A NetGalley ARC ( )

I received an ARC of this book to read through NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.
An Unwilling Earl by Sharon Cullen is a nice mix of marriage of convenience and murder mystery. Jacob Baker a widowed solicitor is reluctantly forced to assume the title Earl of Ashland. Eager to escape the marriage mart he offers marriage in name only to Charlotte Morris a runaway orphan that he met when he rescued her from a horse on the street. Jacob and his friend Armbruster are armchair detectives and the mystery intriguing them at the moment is that young women are being murdered and turning up in the Thames missing their head and hands. A story that will keep you eagerly turning the pages to solve the mystery and to learn if Jacob can ever move on from mourning his first wife create a true marriage with Charlotte. Mild Steam, Publishing Date March 25, 2019. #EntangledPublishing #NetGalley #AnUnwillingEarl #SharonCullen ( )

I enjoy this author’s writing style. I liked both of the main characters and the mystery was an excellent one that was well-plotted and well-delivered. I absolutely loved that the villains got their just deserts in the end. So often, that doesn’t happen.

Jacob Baker is a solicitor who works for barristers doing research, interviewing witnesses, and tracking people down when necessary. He is also a widower who deeply and truly loved his wife, Cora, who died of childbed fever along with their newborn son. He’s been in mourning for five years now. He has also just learned that he has inherited a title, Earl of Ashland, and he is not happy with that intrusion into his life. Jacob is in a bit of a snit because of the title and all of his new responsibilities and the fact he’ll have to give up his law practice when he has a visitor, Baroness Morris, who wants him to find her missing niece – Charlotte. Jacob refuses, but he’s intrigued by the drawing of the young woman and what her aunt had to say about her.

Charlotte Morris is the granddaughter of a marquess who disowned Charlotte’s mother when she ran away and married an untitled man of whom he didn’t approve. Charlotte is now an orphan – her mother died in childbirth and her father died five years ago. Charlotte has been living with an aunt and cousin since then. Charlotte’s aunt has spent those five years mistreating and abusing Charlotte. Now that some other events have happened, Charlotte has run away and is living in the rookeries because if she went anywhere else, her aunt would find her. Ultimately, she plans to go to America to teach the husband-hunting heiresses how to properly behave in English society.

The mystery could be gruesome if it were spelled out in detail. That wouldn’t bother me, but it might bother some readers. Luckily for all of us, it isn’t detailed. There is a monster loose in London and he (or she) is stabbing women and cutting their heads off. The bodies are found, but the heads are not. Charlotte thinks she knows something that will lead to the identity of the murderer, but she is afraid of what she knows and just wants to escape to America.

I thought the mystery was more believable than the romance, but I really enjoyed them both. I did come to believe that Jacob loved Charlotte and it was nice to see them get their HEA.

Why didn’t I give it a full five stars? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, there was just way, way, way too much Cora (Jacob’s first wife) in the story. There was even a place or two where he thought of her either during or just after he and Charlotte had been intimate. All of that ‘Cora’ made it much harder to believe that Jacob loved Charlotte. Second, I think the author must have learned the term Dowager, but not its proper use. Dowager is used as a ‘title’ for every titled female in the story who has lost her husband. That is NOT the correct usage and every time I saw it used as it was, it would completely pull me out of the story. I believe the term is in the book eight or ten times and not one of them is used correctly. Third, there were story inconsistencies such as the villain murdering someone with his dinner knife, then later it was said that they were murdered with the same weapon as the other victims. Maybe I have an uncorrected eARC and all of this will be corrected in the published version of the book.

Those things I mentioned above aside, I would recommend this book and will be looking forward to the next one.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. ( )

While I did enjoy the book, I really didn't believe that the hero Jacob really fell in love with the heroine Charlotte. So Jacob is widower and he truly did love his love and she was the only woman he had ever been with. He decides to become some type of detective (not really just assisted) he does this to pass the time to deal with his grief. Unfortunately london is having a whole lot of murder happening and here he ends up meeting Charlotte. Charlotte is on the run since she is thinking her cousin is involved in these murders and she does not really trust much, she finally decides to get assistance and tell Jacob her belief, these two get married for convenience sakes, she for some reason fell in love with Jacob but he doesn't want to fall in love again, and tat is where I truly never believed he was in love he couldn't get over his first wife.. Yes supposedly they do fall, the book is sometime a little too grisly for me and unbelievable for a historical romance book but yes it was still enjoyable

Rcvd an ARC at no cost to author..(netgalley) Voluntarily reviewed with my own thoughts and opinions ( )