Review: Entertaining, but not my favorite
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2014
Complimentary copy provided in exchange for an honest review.Leeta is a twenty three year old that has the world on a string. She is a recent law grad that has landed an amazing job with what is essentially the district attorney’s office. She is getting ready to wrap up her first case as the solo prosecutor and the sky is the limit. She has an amazing boyfriend, Mace, that she has been with for six months and is ready for him to meet the parents. Unfortunately Leeta’s parents are incredibly conservative; her father is a retired Army colonel and her mother is the consummate officer’s wife.Mace is crime family royalty. After losing his mother at an early age, he deals with a father and brother whom are both incarcerated, and a baby sister that committed suicide a year prior. While it would have been easy to fall into the same lifestyle of crime as his father and brother, Mace is committed to staying out of trouble as the owner of a motorcycle repair shop. Leeta isn’t the kind of girl that Mace usually goes for, what with her being a lawyer and all, but there is an instant attraction between the two of them and the past six months have been good.The first third of the book reads like sex scenes for the sake of sex scenes. It’s not that it wasn’t hot, Ms. Johnson certainly knows how to heat things up, but it didn’t really seem to do anything to advance the storyline, or prove that there was a connection between Leeta and Mace, other than physical. With so much at stake for Leeta to pursue a relationship with Mace, you would think there would just be…more, between them. It isn’t until the storyline really starts to pick up at over the 50% mark that we really see that connection is there, even though at that point the relationship is in jeopardy.There were some plot twists that I certainly didn’t see coming, which I completely appreciated. They certainly kept me engaged and interested, and you couldn’t help but feel for Mace and know that ultimately he was doing what he thought was right. He was certainly a likeable character, especially given what he has been dealt in life. The plot was questionably realistic, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of it.Provoke is a solid, entertaining four star read. It is well written, and the characters are well-developed with a storyline that keeps you interested, however Leeta’s lack of maturity really started to grate on my nerves after awhile. It got to feel a little angsty, which is a bit of a turn off for me. While I can understand Leeta may have had trouble understanding and processing what she thought she knew, she could certainly possess the maturity to communicate with him. Provoke was a quick, easy read, and while not the best Ms. Johnson has given us, it is certainly worth your time to pick it up.