One Night Stand
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This sexy, action-packed thriller, set on the streets and in the courthouses of Los Angeles, is an explosive literary mix of contemporary urban authenticity and classic old-school crime fiction by the author of Damaged Goods and the cult classic The School on 103rd Street.
How did a street hustler, in and out of jail since he was ten, beat a murder rap -- no matter whether he did the crime or not? Meet Myra Cross, a thirty-one-year-old redheaded beauty with a take-no-prisoners reputation as a public defender. She confounds her colleagues and clients alike as she not only wins acquittal after acquittal for her clients but poses for Playboy spreads in her spare time. She has the face of an angel, the body of a goddess, and a mind like a steel trap -- but with secrets and demons, she neither pretends to be a Girl Scout nor to have all the answers. But this time, when she's once again assigned the defense of Napoleon T. Booker, aka Little Dog Nine, who's charged with another homicide, she gets much more than she bargained for.
"Street smarts stopped Myra Cross dead in her tracks. Napoleon Booker had reached inside her brain and ripped out her essence, dangled it in front of her like an item for sale at an eBay auction. Was she that transparent -- 'a coke-snorting, nymphomaniac basehead little freak?'"
Roland S. Jefferson's fiction earns him comparisons to fellow master storytellers, including Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley. This hot new novel will have his loyal following and a legion of new fans alike on fire, sitting on the edge of their seats in this pulse-pounding thriller they won't be able to put down until the last page!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
