{"id":487,"date":"2023-03-16T23:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-03-17T03:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/samiamreadingandreviewing.wordpress.com\/?p=487"},"modified":"2025-06-24T21:02:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T21:02:59","slug":"a-gentleman-ought-to-know-jane-ashford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/?p=487","title":{"rendered":"A Gentleman Ought to Know – Jane Ashford"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ironically, I have the first book in this series on my TBR list! It felt like I was missing a little bit of history while reading A Gentleman Ought to Know<\/em>, so that explains it. I hadn\u2019t known it was part of a series when I requested it from NetGalley. I am leaving this review voluntarily. I thought this novel was a middling romance and give it three out of five stars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte Deeping isn\u2019t looking for a husband; all of the gentlemen she met during the season in London seemed to be insincere and mindless. She likes a good puzzle and has solved several with her school friends, but finds herself bored and purposeless now that she\u2019s back at her family estate. In the middle of a walk, she\u2019s almost run down by a man on horseback – one of her brother\u2019s school friends, here to take part in the hunting season. Once she learns that his parents were killed and the killer never found, she can\u2019t resist getting to know the Marquess of Glendavron better. Will she find her perfect match, as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Marquess, Laurence Lindley, is shocked by the informality of the Deeping family and their easygoing camaraderie. He\u2019s very reserved and didn\u2019t want to turn down the invitation of his school friend, but would rather stay in his controlled social sphere. His dramatic and mysterious past has made him cautious and Charlotte, with her forthright personality, may just be the one to break him free from his self-imposed isolation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I liked the two main characters of this novel individually; Laurence, having an unusual childhood being bounced from guardian to guardian, was characteristically reserved and reluctant to form attachments to anyone. Charlotte, with a family who respected and cared about her, was confident in herself and her abilities. They are very much an \u201copposites attract\u201d couple, and I liked that. I felt that both their backgrounds were established well enough at the beginning of the book that it set the characters up well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot of this novel was also pretty decent; I won\u2019t say that the mystery component was stunning, by any means, but it was considerably better than the last mystery romance I reviewed for NetGalley (How to Court a Covert Lady, here). This plot was fairly unique, although not incredibly complex. It was well suited for a mystery romance. The romance plot was pretty standard, I thought, with no twists involved. It did end happily, which pleased me – as you know I am not one for sad endings.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were a couple of elements that annoyed me about this novel; I found that Charlotte was a little callous in her pursuit of the mystery of the Marquess and that Laurence seemed to move past his traumatic childhood without much difficulty. As soon as Charlotte heard about Laurence\u2019s past and his parent\u2019s death, she thought \u201cOh, a mystery to solve, what fun!\u201d and seemed to treat the issue as a lark rather than as a serious, emotionally difficult matter. Luckily, she had others in her life to remind her that her investigation wasn\u2019t a game, which was a feature of this novel that I really appreciated.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laurence didn\u2019t become involved with Charlotte\u2019s investigation until about halfway through this book when he was already forming an attachment to her. So, I\u2019m sure that played a part in his willingness to dig up the past that he had ignored for so long. But, he ended up reliving the night of his parent\u2019s deaths and then just kind of turned around and said \u201cokay, what next?\u201d as if nothing had happened. From then on, he appeared to be over losing his parents and his resulting unfortunate childhood sufferings. He also needed to prove his feelings for Charlotte were real (as happens, in romance books), and decided that being equally dedicated to the puzzle of his parents\u2019 deaths was the way to go. It worked, of course, but I just found it quite\u2026 macabre.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many other detecting couples, of course: Verity and Sidney Kent (Verity Kent series, Anna Lee Huber), Veronica and Stoker (Veronica Speedwell series, Deanna Raybourn), Wrexford and Sloane (Wrexford and Sloane series, Andrea Penrose), Sebastian and Hero (Sebastian St. Cyr series, C.S. Harris). Each has faced their own share of personal challenges and\/or tragedies, but they treat them with much more deference and gravitas than Charlotte and eventually, Laurence have done here.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All in all, I thought A Gentleman Ought to Know<\/em> was passable. It wasn\u2019t my favorite, but I\u2019ve certainly read worse. If you\u2019d like a clean romance novel with a little bit of mystery, this book might suit you well.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ironically, I have the first book in this series on my TBR list! It felt like I was missing a little bit of history while reading A Gentleman Ought to Know, so that explains it. I hadn\u2019t known it was part of a series when I requested it from NetGalley. I am leaving this reviewContinue reading “A Gentleman Ought to Know – Jane Ashford”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[6,33,52,169,194,293,344,349,414],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-a-gentleman-ought-to-know","tag-arc","tag-book-review","tag-historical-romance","tag-jane-ashford","tag-netgalley","tag-review","tag-romance","tag-the-dukes-estates","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/a-gentleman-ought-to-know.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":611,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}