Knockin' Boots

Price-Thompson sets a colorful cast of characters on the road to explosive conflict in her sometimes racy, sometimes raunchy fourth novel. Heating up New Jersey's Fort Dix (and steaming up the book's pages) are sex-addicted army demolition instructor Kevin Lawson ("women passed out just from sniffing my vapors"); his wife, ex-stripper Fancy ("a preacher's daughter with a whore's body"); Fancy's best girl, Staff Sgt. Sparkle Henderson ("Men just loved me! Women hated me on sight"); and Emile Pinchback, a commander at the 12th Army NCO Academy, Kevin's foster brother and self-hating, gynophobic black man ("I wouldn't touch a black woman with a ten-foot pole"). The plot in a nutshell? Who's putting the zoom-zoom in whose boom-boom. Kevin consorts with hookers and makes Fancy do nasty things, which she loves and hates at the same time; Sparkle's on the lookout for a good man, but when she finds one she sends him packing; and Emile is just trying to love his skinny white girl, the barmaid Becky Ann. The relationships get screwed up, the sex gets dirtier and more violent and the specter of AIDS looms. Price-Thompson, herself a Desert Storm veteran, has spun an X-rated cautionary tale sure to appeal to Zane fans everywhere. (Oct.)