Day and Knight, by Dirk Greyson

[Ulysses]

Day and Knight
By Dirk Greyson
Dreamspinner Press, 2015
Four stars

When new recruit Dayton Ingram is paired with the mysterious, brooding “Knight” Knighton for his first field assignment for Scorpion Logistics, he has no idea what he’s getting into. Assigned to break up a terrorist cell hidden in the Yucatan, Day and Knight are assigned to slip into Mexico unnoticed, playing a couple on a gay cruise. Suddenly, for both men, it gets a little too real.

I certainly enjoyed Dirk Greyson’s expected good mix of action and romance; and by the end of it I finally had come to care about both of the main characters. Strangely, though, both Day and Knight seemed slightly unreal to me – like the kind of not-quite-believable gay men that we sometimes accuse women m/m authors of writing. While it’s a little comforting to know that male writers can struggle to create authentic gay male characters, it also hampered my enjoyment of the book. Knighton’s backstory made his personality immediately comprehensible (if somewhat unlikable). Dayton’s denial of his gay side less understandable. I guess it’s the idea of a twenty-something in this day and age being so closeted that rubs me the wrong way. And I guess something each reader will react to differently.

The building tension between the two men, sexual and otherwise, is well orchestrated and palpable. As I do with many m/m novels, I thought that there was more sex than was necessary to achieve the emotional and physical connections between the main characters. But aside from some rocky cliché-ridden prose in the first half of the book, I again enjoyed Greyson’s clean, journalistic style.

Love, as Dirk Greyson shows us, isn’t about words. One detail at the very end made me smile because it perfectly proved that point.