Review: Overruled (The legal Briefs #1) by Emma Chase

Overruled (The legal Briefs #1) by Emma Chase
Narrators: Jason Carpenter, Charlotte Penfield
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date: 28th April 2015
My rating: 5 stars 

A Washington, DC, defense attorney, Stanton Shaw keeps his head cool, his questions sharp, and his arguments irrefutable. They don't call him the Jury Charmer for nothing - with his Southern drawl, disarming smile, and captivating green eyes, he's a hard man to say no to. Men want to be him, and women want to be thoroughly cross-examined by him. Stanton's a man with a plan. And for a while life is going according to that plan. Until the day he receives an invitation to the wedding of his high school sweetheart, the mother of his beloved 10-year-old daughter. Jenny is getting married - to someone who isn't him. That's definitely not part of the plan. Sofia Santos is a city-raised, no-nonsense litigator who plans to become the most revered criminal defense attorney in the country. She doesn't have time for relationships or distractions. But when Stanton, her "friend with mind-blowing benefits", begs her for help, she finds herself out of her element, out of her depth, and obviously out of her mind. Because she agrees to go with him to The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Mississippi, to do all she can to help Stanton win back the woman he loves. Her head tells her she's crazy... and her heart says something else entirely. What happens when you mix a one-stop-light town, two professional arguers, a homecoming queen, four big brothers, some Jimmy Dean sausage, and a gun-toting Nana? The Bourbon flows, passions rise, and even the best-laid plans get overruled by the desires of the heart.

I’d listened to Chase’s Tangled series before and despite it being narrated by Sebastian York, I sadly wasn’t a fan, but then when going through Chase’s books and I came across her Legal Brief’s series and I knew I had to give it a go and I’m so glad that I did, as I ended up absolutely loving Overruled. I loved how Chase started the beginning of this book, as I had read the summary of the book so long ago, I was quite surprised with the turn of events, as I’d thought that Jenny and Stanton would have been together forever. But with the way the story developed, I was glad later on that this wasn’t the case at all.

I could understand Stanton’s reasoning for wanting to go back home and stop Jenny’s wedding to another guy, he had assumed that he and Jenny were meant to be, yes, they currently lived in different states, and had been with different people over the course of their “relationship”, but she was the mother of their child and when Stanton went back to Mississippi it was always Jenny. So, when Stanton got the news and decided to go back, I didn’t like the fact at first that he was taking Sofia with him, his reasoning behind it was that she was a woman, so would have a better understanding of Jenny’s character and could also calm him down and keep him in check if he got too angry and went overboard in trying to win Jenny back. But it wasn’t fair on Sofia at all, Stanton and Sofia had been sleeping together for a little while, but that’s all it was, they were work colleagues, so didn’t need any further blurring of their relationship. So, as you can imagine, Stanton’s behaviour did make me mad at times, he was hell bent on winning Jenny back that he couldn’t see that he had something amazing right in front of him in Sofia. This minor irritation aside though, I still ended up really enjoying Overruled, it was funny seeing the lengths to which Stanton would go to win Jenny back, and just generally Stanton was an overall funny guy. He had such a dry sense of humour that caused me to laugh out loud several times, and receive strange looks from people on my commute to work. But I couldn’t care less, as this was such a funny book and Chase mixed up aspects of the romance and humour really well. Also, we didn’t really know which way things would go romance-wise (well I knew which way I wanted them to) and then you had characters such as Jake and Brent (Stanton’s co-workers) and Stanton’s family bringing so much drama and fun to the story too.

I really liked the story that Chase gave us with Stanton, Sofia, Jenny and her fiancé JD, but the secondary characters bought so much to the mix, making Overruled such a delight to read. And let me just say the narration from Jason Carpenter and Charlotte Penfield just made this book for me, Carpenter’s Southern drawl and charm that he put into Stanton’s character was just on point, it definitely made his character more realistic and also bought a lot of swoon too!

Overruled was a brilliant start to a new series for me, it reminded me a lot of the TV show Suits; with clever lawyers running around all over the place, but it was also charming, funny and full with such weird and wonderful characters that I know I’ll have a hard time putting the rest of the series down.