cover image One Night Stand

One Night Stand

Roland S. Jefferson. Atria Books, $24 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-6888-2

Jefferson's over-the-top fifth novel requires more suspension of belief and provides less entertainment than his previous work (The School on 103rd Street; Damaged Goods). The far-fetched heroine is 31-year-old divorcee Myra Cross, ""a cyclone of shameless sexuality"" who's about to appear nude in a ""professional women's"" issue of Playboy, a prospect that leads her to consider abandoning her successful career as a Los Angeles public defender for the life of a national sex symbol. Jefferson, a forensic psychiatrist, depicts Cross as a coke-sniffing nymphomaniac and gives her supposed intelligence little opportunity to show itself. She's dragged into a vicious game of cat and mouse with corrupt cops when five of them frame a former client of hers-an equally improbable creation, a gangbanger named Napoleon T. Booker who litters his conversation with terms like ""core aesthetic."" Jefferson's irrepressible prose often verges on parody (Cross's dress rides ""up her thigh like an out-of-control elevator""), though the book's opening chapter shows flashes of a greater talent.