Publisher Note: “Publisher's Note: This book is a homoerotic love story. It contains sexual acts that may be offensive to some readers: male-male sexual practices.”

Brandon and Nicholas are two individuals very much in love, and very good together, in music and in life. But because they are very different types of people, their love doesn’t communicate as well as it should. Nicholas needs to hear words, and for him, words spill readily from his mind and heart; for Brandon, words are difficult, especially the three simple ones Nicholas needs most to hear: “I love you.” Brandon knows them, he means them, and he lives them; he just can’t find it in himself to say them.

By the time Brandon first met Nicholas, after he himself had dropped out of high school to form a band, Nicholas was a well-known gay actor who reveled in acknowledgement of his preferences. Brandon was still firmly in the closet. The moment Brandon spots Nicholas in a play, and hears him sing, he knows this is the man he wants to love, to write music for, and to live with forever. From that point on, they enter into a push-me, pull-you relationship in which both hearts and souls are committed, but only one can stand to make it real. Eventually, a terrible, tragic, event will nearly tear the two completely apart, and to finally make it real at last, Brandon must resort to the one activity he could not bring himself to practice until now: the written word. He will have to recreate his love and passion for Nicholas through writing their story, before it’s too late for Nicholas.

This story drops the reader into a boiling vat of intrigue, excitement, and sensuality from the first page and then turns up the heat! This reviewer could barely follow the twists and turns even from the beginning because Carolyn Gray knows how to pen a puzzler and keep the reader loving it. Despite the celebrity status of the protagonists (an actor-singer, and a musician), I found them readily identifiable and easy to care about. A Red-Tainted Silence is a story I highly recommend, and it is definitely on my keeper shelf as a frequent re-reader.