Lady Charlotte Always Gets Her Man is a fun, old-fashioned, quick-witted romantic mystery with medium stakes and a sense of humor; it’s a good mix of genuinely suspenseful romance and lighthearted romp. It lacks nuance and has some anachronistic behavior, which means I had to drop the grade a bit, but overall it’s a good time that starts off what appears to be a series of romantic historical mysteries about a lady and the doctor she entrances.

Lady Charlotte Lovett is not thinking of love, though her mother definitely is. She quickly learns she’s been betrothed to Viscount Hawley, who has a long and awful string of marital relationships behind him. She’s heard that he killed his two previous wives along with multiple other innocents, and she’s determined to prove it. To that end, she enlists the man’s brother, Dr. Matthew Talbot, who has recently returned to England, to prove that his brother is a psychotic murderer before her mother can announce her engagement to him.

Bookish Matthew can well believe that his brother is capable of such felonious behavior. The best friend of her twin brother Alexander, Matthew has known Charlotte for a long time and loved her from afar for just as long – though it’s been years since he’s seen her. Determined to protect the Talbot family secrets (and his own) while preventing Charlotte’s marriage to the Viscount, Matthew agrees to help, but might there be something more interesting waiting for them once the mystery’s solved?

There’s a lot of Enola Holmes in Lady Charlotte Always Gets Her Man, occasionally to its detriment. Sometimes anachronistic, the book delivers some thoughtful, heavy morals while also boasting a love affair between a capuchin monkey and a parrot. Yes, really. The uneven tone here can be a bit sticky.

Charlotte and Matthew hang out at an underground coffee shop run by biracial cousins of Charlotte’s who have been disowned by her awful, social-climbing parents. The fight for racial and sexual equality provides a major backbone to this story, and a lot of different issues come up in the romance when Charlotte isn’t performing acts of derring-do, with Matthew eventually her helpful accomplice. But everyone here is pretty sweet, and the romance between Matthew and Charlotte is truly enjoyable.

But then there are the villains, from Charlotte’s parents to the Viscount, and they have absolutely no moral complexity or depth. If you want a mystery that’s a little more mysterious – and one with complex villains and a reasonable degree of historical accuracy you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. Yet I liked the vivid writing style and the romance is top-notch. Lady Charlotte Always Gets Her Man is fun and sweet, but not quite DIK material.