In Sabrina Jeffries’ ‘Who Wants to Marry a Duke,’ the Heroine is No Wilting Flower [REVIEW]

In Who Wants to Marry a Duke, the third dazzling installment of Sabrina Jeffries’ Duke Dynasty series (after The Bachelor), a beautiful young chemist is recruited to determine if a duke’s father died of natural causes or was poisoned. But will her experimental methods prove successful or will her investigation be thwarted before it even begins?

When forthright Miss Olivia Norley first meets Marlowe Drake, the Duke of Thornstock, she is a naive young woman intent on devoting her entire life to chemistry, not the countless debutante balls in Regency London. But when Olivia’s stepmother catches them kissing, she blackmails Thorn in an effort to secure her daughter a handsome husband. Forced to offer a proposal, Thorn is shocked when Olivia refuses to marry him, and he thereby becomes determined to avoid both women in the future.

Several years later, Thorn’s brother Grey hires Olivia to run tests on his father’s remains to find out if he was murdered with arsenic, as Grey suspects. When Olivia and Thorn run into each other again at a society ball, they are instantly suspicious of each other despite their mutual attraction. Grateful to Grey for the opportunity to test her skills as a chemist, Olivia proves she is no wilting flower and is determined to make the most of the opportunity. Thorn mistrusts her, and resolves to keep an eye on the young scientist, until he can see for himself whether or not she is legit.

Thorn’s constant presence threatens to ruin everything. First, he is a constant distraction to Olivia on both a professional and personal level, and she begins to wonder if he will ever let her finish her experiments. And the longer she is around him, the closer she gets to figuring out the closely guarded secret he has been keeping from both his family and the Ton. Meanwhile, someone else is keeping an eye on both of them, and if they aren’t careful, everything they care about may go up in smoke: their reputations, the experiments, and possibly their very lives.

While the Duke Dynasty series has been consistently entertaining, Who Wants to Marry a Duke is the best book to date. While this is a mystery rife with suspense, it is one fueled by Jeffries’ cheeky humor which shines through in her characters’ witty banter. Olivia and Thorn are a pleasure to watch as they learn to navigate through the turbulent waters of family and society, particularly as their relationship evolves and their misgivings about one another melt away. Fans of fun, flirty, Regency romance will love this smart addition to the genre.

Sabrina Jeffries is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 50 novels and works of short fiction (some written under the pseudonyms Deborah Martin and Deborah Nicholas).

Whatever time not spent writing in a coffee-fueled haze is spent traveling with her husband and adult autistic son or indulging in one of her passions—jigsaw puzzles, chocolate, and music.

With over 9 million books in print in more than 21 languages, the North Carolina author never regrets tossing aside a budding career in academics for the sheer joy of writing fun fiction and hopes that one day a book of hers will end up saving the world. She always dreams big.

For more information, visit SabrinaJeffries.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Goodreads, and BookBub.

WHO WANTS TO MARRY A DUKE
By Sabrina Jeffries
352 pp. Zebra. $7.99

Purchase Who Wants to Marry a Duke direct from Jathan & Heather Books or from one of these other fine online retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Half Price Books, Hudson Booksellers, IndieBound, Powell’s, Target, or Walmart.