Title: Knight in Shiny Leathers
Author: Glyn Soitiño
Length: 8,000 words (29 pdf pages)
Publisher: Torquere Press
Genre: m/m contemporary
Rating: C+
Blurb:
When Chris is rescued from a mugger by a tall, dark stranger on a motorbike, the last thing he expects is to be asked out on a date. Though emotionally fragile from having suffered failed relationships in the past, Chris feels an immediate rapport with Paul. Maybe, this time, his luck has changed.
Yet seeing is believing, and what Chris sees a few days later convinces him to call it off with Paul. But what did he really see? Whatever the truth of the matter, Paul is not the kind of guy to take no for an answer…
Review:
I really like this author’s voice and have enjoyed her stories in the past, but in this one, Chris is just so annoying and paranoid at the end that I found it hard to like him, or figure out why Paul pushed so hard. I’d think his behaviour would be a giant red flag.
Chris is mugged at the ATM early in the morning and motorcycle guy Paul shows up and makes sure he’s okay. Paul asks him out and Chris has had some bad dating experiences so is wary, but Paul is his type. They have a terrific date, although it’s cut short when Paul gets called into work at the hospital where he’s a nurse. They make a follow-up date a few days later, but when Chris sees Paul at the pub they visited with a man he hugs, he presumes that Paul is cheating and calls off their second date and refuses to even explain why. Paul persists and when he tells Chris he’s coming to his work to talk, Paul totally loses it, sure he’s being stalked and about to be killed.
Of course, Paul’s not cheating at all and Chris was a mile off base, but he was soooo paranoid about the whole thing, that rather than ask a simple questions, he presumed a million negative scenarios and acted like a total whack job. I get that he’d had a few bad experiences dating, but hey, who hasn’t? He jumps to conclusions without any evidence, and even though Paul told him his brother worked at the pub, and the guy in questions looked a lot like Paul, he still presumes the worst.
So all in all, until it got to the latter half where he went all freaky, I liked the story a great deal. There was some cute banter, they seemed well matched and then… Others may not find Chris’ behaviour as off-putting as I did, and there is certainly nothing wrong with the author’s style and prose, I just didn’t like Chris that much in the end and wasn’t sure Paul shouldn’t just pass on this one as a bad dating experience and move on.
Hmm, sounds like that could have been fixed with some artfully placed introspection by Chris. Maybe he’s having some mini PTSD mugging episode? If he realized he was being a whack job that’d be fine with me, but it doesn’t sound like that’s how it turned out…
No, he’d had some boyfriends leave him out of the blue and had quite bad self-esteem, and while he was embarrassed that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, it was just so over the top, I couldn’t get past that. Mind you, after one date Paul was kind of a stalker too, so maybe they were perfect for each other. LOL
Pretty sure this one would annoy me. A lot.
If he hadn’t been so over the top at the end I might have put it down to extreme self-esteem issues but he kind of lost the plot when Paul said he was coming to talk to him.
Oh dear. I hate it when people just jump to conclusions which then leads to a BM. Shame, because I like this author usually.
Yeah. I like her style a great deal, but in this case the BM and his extreme reactions left me a bit baffled.