One Good Earl Deserves a Lover
She is a scientist, she is nearly engaged, and she has decided that before she marries she requires data. So she selects a subject, walks into London’s most notorious gaming hell, and asks the bookkeeper to ruin her. For research.
Book bio
What this book actually is
Title: One Good Earl Deserves a Lover
Author: Sarah MacLean
Series: Yes. Book 2 of Rules of Scoundrels, and a direct sequel in the sense that the heroine is the previous heroine’s sister.
Setting: London, Regency. The Fallen Angel again, this time the counting room upstairs rather than the floor below.
Couple: Lady Philippa “Pippa” Marbury and Cross, who is really Jasper Arlesey, Earl Harlow.
Tropes: Bluestocking heroine, tortured hero with a secret identity, teach-me seduction, betrothed to the wrong man, forced proximity, hero convinced he is beyond saving.
Read it if: you want a Regency heroine whose defining trait is not spirit or beauty but methodology.
Book one belonged to a man who had decided the world owed him something. Book two belongs to a woman who has decided the world owes her an explanation, which turns out to be a much better engine. Pippa is a naturalist. She reads, she observes, she takes notes, and she has arrived at the conclusion that she is about to sign a lifelong contract with a man while being deliberately kept ignorant of one of its principal terms. She finds this unacceptable on intellectual grounds before she finds it unacceptable on any other.
Premise
The concept, without spoiling it
Lady Philippa Marbury is bespectacled and brilliant, and she cares a great deal more about flora than about fashion and about science than about the season. She is two weeks or so from marrying Lord Castleton, who is kind, dull, and entirely acceptable. What she is not, and what nobody will help her become, is informed.
So she does what she would do with any other gap in her knowledge. She researches the problem, identifies the person best placed to answer it, and goes to find him. That person is Cross, the tall, quick, famously disreputable bookkeeper who keeps The Fallen Angel solvent. Her proposal is exact and unromantic: she wants the experience of ruination without the consequences of ruination. Science, not sentiment. She has a fortnight and a list.
Cross says no, obviously. Cross is also carrying something he does not discuss, starting with the fact that he is not really called Cross at all. He is Jasper Arlesey, Earl Harlow, a second son who was never supposed to hold the title, and the reason he does hold it is a night he has never forgiven himself for.
Plot
Where it goes
The arrangement does not stay clinical, because it never could, and the interesting part is that Pippa is the first to notice her own data going wrong. Meanwhile the wedding to Castleton is still on the calendar, and Pippa’s problem stops being a question of knowledge and becomes a question of honor: she has given her word to a decent man she does not love.
She resolves it the way she resolves everything, by working out what is actually true and then acting on it regardless of what it costs her socially. And when Cross gets himself into trouble he considers deserved, she does not wait to be rescued from her own engagement. She goes and gets him.
Arcs
How the book is built
Characters
Who you need to know
Lady Philippa MarburyHeroineBespectacled, methodical, and genuinely a scientist rather than a woman the book calls clever. Penelope’s younger sister. Approaches her own seduction as a research programme and is not embarrassed about it.
CrossHero · Jasper Arlesey, Earl HarlowThe bookkeeper whose mathematics keep The Angel alive, and a peer of the realm who does not use the name. Second son of the Harlow line, and the title reached him by a route he cannot forgive.
PenelopeSister · book one’s heroineNow Marchioness of Bourne, and in a position to be considerably more useful to a sister with a scheme than she could have been a year earlier.
TemplePartner · the Killer DukeStill fighting in the club’s ring, still carrying a murder he is not sure he did not commit. His book is next.
Also: Lord Castleton, the fiancé, who is the rare romance-novel obstacle written as a genuinely nice man rather than a fool. And the Arlesey family: Viscount Baine, the elder brother who was everything the heir was supposed to be, and Lavinia, the younger sister Jasper promised to chaperone at her first Almack’s and did not.
Reacts
Scene reactions
Review
Loves, hates, and the honest verdict
What works
Pippa. A bluestocking heroine usually means a woman who reads; this one has a method, and MacLean lets her be genuinely odd rather than quirky-adorable. Framing a seduction as an experiment is funny for about thirty pages and then quietly becomes the most respectful version of that plot anyone has written, because the heroine has consented to it in advance, in writing, with terms.
What does not
Cross’s guilt is the weakest link. The withheld backstory is held back a little too long and lands a little too neatly, and a hero whose entire arc is deciding he is allowed to want things is less interesting than the woman opposite him doing calculus about her own life. Castleton also deserved a better exit than the plot gives him.
A full review is coming.
Series
Rules of Scoundrels, in order
Bourne · 2012
Cross · You are here
Temple · 2013
Chase · 2014
Cover images are the publishers’ official covers, used to identify the editions discussed. All other artwork is original CVM Sekai fan art. Unlike the book one hub, no part of this novel has been read directly for this page: premise, characters, identities and family details come from the publisher’s description, the series bibliography and character reference material, and the page deliberately stops short of describing beats that have not been verified.