I enjoyed the chase!

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An Unwilling Earl (Mayfair Men of Mystery #1) by Sharon Cullen          
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 a 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

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