The Magpie Lord

Lucien Vaudrey never planned to set foot in England again after twenty years' exile in Shanghai, but the sudden deaths of his father and brother leave him the reluctant new Earl of Crane — and heir to his family's enemies along with its title. Almost at once he is struck by suicidal compulsions that are nothing natural: someone has cursed him, and they mean to finish the job.

Stephen Day is a justiciar, a working magician who polices the supernatural corners of Victorian England, and he has his own reasons to despise the Vaudrey name. He breaks the immediate curse easily enough, but the deeper conspiracy against Crane's life turns out to be far more serious — and Stephen finds himself dangerously drawn to the aristocrat he came to hate.

The first book in K.J. Charles's "A Charm of Magpies" trilogy, The Magpie Lord pairs an enemies-to-lovers romance with a genuinely eerie mystery, set in a Victorian England where magic runs just beneath the surface of polite society.