The Fifth Favor by Shelby Reed was a very engross­ing read. It’s the story about a reporter and a gigolo. About two peo­ple find­ing each other, need­ing each other and meet­ing each other at the right time in their life. It’s a love story. Aren’t they all?

Bil­lie Cort is a reporter out for the story of her career: to do a story on the male escort ser­vice at Azure. The tar­get of her story is none other than Adrian Atoli who is the most pop­u­lar male escort at Azure. Adrian is a con­flicted man. He is tor­tured and has a lot of bag­gage. Mean­while, Bil­lie is frus­trated with life and love and finds her­self utterly fas­ci­nated by Adrian. Bil­lie is granted an inter­view for the mag­a­zine Illicit with the elu­sive star of Azure but then sud­denly, tragedy strikes and the inter­view of a life­time is yanked.

There are a lot of strug­gles in this book. The story is some­what darker. It read a like cycle of highs and lows. There were some great moments in the book between the pro­tag­o­nists.  The author con­tin­ues to cre­ate won­der­ful chem­istry and great atmos­phere. I enjoyed this book very much. There were many con­flicts in the story.  Adrian feels that he can­not have a healthy, nor­mal rela­tion­ship out­side of Azure but after meet­ing Bil­lie Cort, he plays with fire and falls hard. Bil­lie seems to rep­re­sent every­thing that is good and whole­some about life while Adrian has only seen the seed­ier side of life.

Adrian’s fam­ily has no idea about his career choice and Billie’s edi­tor has no idea that she is car­ry­ing on an affair with the sub­ject of her inter­view. The con­trivances that keep them apart and even­tu­ally bring them back together were real­is­tic and evolved out the nat­ural pro­gres­sion of the story. I did feel that the story at time could have been shorter. The intro­spec­tion and inter­nal strug­gles went on a bit too long, I thought. Also, the author doesn’t con­sum­mate the rela­tion­ship until we get near the end of the story. There were many moments before that — that I thought they would and didn’t. How­ever, there’s plenty of fore­play to keep you entertained.

The sec­ondary char­ac­ters like Adrian’s fam­ily and such were inter­est­ing and rounded out the story well enough. Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion was pretty solid espe­cially for Adrian’s char­ac­ter as well as the dia­logue and story. This story reminded of yet another book, Fallen From Grace by Laura Leone. So if you’ve enjoyed Ms. Leone’s book, then you would cer­tainly enjoy this one.  Would The Fifth Favor be a book I would read more than once? Jury is still out on that one. It’s not a keeper for me but it was still, a very good book and a strong recommend.

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