Wow, this was such an amazing book. I feel really bad about not finishing this series before, and also for somehow erasing it from my mind (?). Seriously, I cannot recall ever reading it before. How’s that possible, when it was one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read this year?

Provoked had everything I could want from a historical MM romance. I'm pretty much a connoisseur of that genre by now (maybe that’s what went wrong the last time, I was still unenlightened! ( )

The audio book production is excellent and the narrator is perfect. i swear I could listen to him forever.

The story kept me engaged, but I won't do a full review until I have finished the rest of the series. As a standalone this ends with the MCs apart and with no indication there will be further contact.

As is often the case with 1st person pov, I find I prefer the non-pov character. David is rigid and unbending in his beliefs, he is also self-flagellating about his 'abhorrent' nature to the point where he appears to be borderline alcoholic. ( )

The audio book production is excellent and the narrator is perfect. i swear I could listen to him forever.

The story kept me engaged, but I won't do a full review until I have finished the rest of the series. As a standalone this ends with the MCs apart and with no indication there will be further contact.

As is often the case with 1st person pov, I find I prefer the non-pov character. David is rigid and unbending in his beliefs, he is also self-flagellating about his 'abhorrent' nature to the point where he appears to be borderline alcoholic. ( )

I listened to this due to Caz's favorable review of the new, Scottish narrator. He pairs so well with David, earnest as all hell. Wonderful as Murdo, who is a certified asshole I'd like to climb.

Looking forward to reading (listening)on in this series. I will say that the final chapter of this book was fabulous, as were quite a few scenes, but sometimes the sentence structure drives me bonkers. It's too rigid? She does best when it's flowing more naturally, but otherwise there's a lot of repetitive feel to it.

Rating: 4* of five

I'd rate this lower if I hadn't been prepared for the modest sexual content. What there was the author did well and it wasn't gratuitous or inorganic. I was sure the story needed to be in that place at that moment; I was sure the characters were true to their established motivations; in the end, it wasn't about dissatisfaction that I've read from a few other reviewers. I suspect the issues arose from what I was inclined to see as "instaluuuv" between men of radically (!) different stations in Regency life.

That mattered a great deal more then than it does now. Not that it doesn't now, it definitely does, but then it was an issue front and center in every act of daily life. How Balfour comes on to David is completely believable. How David responds, and how he feels, is also completely believable.

That Murdo Balfour argues for the pragmatic accommodation of self to society is unremarkably in character; that David starchily stands for conformity to the harshest possible code of actions while suffering for it is also unremarkably in character for his Presbyterian upbringing. A sect that preached predestination...your soul's salvation was not earned or even earnable since God decided the identity of the 144,000 saved at the beginning of time....wasn't likely to produce anything but the most craven sorts of lickspittles.

What made the read pleasurable for me was the sense that the men were genuinely, if ineptly and obtusely, falling for the person wearing the pretty face that neither could quite unsee. David's red hair, Balfour's dark eyes, David's slightness and Balfour's height and heft...timelessly, opposites do indeed attract. But the characters, the bits that have to fit if a passion is to alter its bell curve towards love's more complex shapes, do match. The men are motivated by their respective and surprisingly similar sense of honor.

It's just a pity that David's sense of humor is so impaired at the expense of that sense of honor.

Not for the squeamishly heterosexual. ( )