cover image What They Want

What They Want

Omar Tyree, . . Simon & Schuster, $21.95 (418pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-2869-5

Successful 33-year-old black model Terrance Mitchell humps his way around the world, staying in exotic locales only long enough to attend a photo shoot and nail a few attractive locals in NAACP Image Award–winner Tyree's latest (after Boss Lady ). Lately, though, Terrance has been thinking it might be time to give up his "bad-ass" life of banging strangers and ex-girlfriends, and having threesomes with, say, a teenager and her 22-year-old pal, or with an ex and her lesbian lover. There is some background noise behind all the diddling and pleasured moaning: Terrance's unwed sister gets pregnant and must decide whether to have the baby; a model Terrance used to work with has adopted a celibate lifestyle; one of the modeling agency execs who works with him is contemplating having a baby on her own and asks Terrance if he wants to be the sperm donor. Terrance, though, only begins to genuinely consider a change in lifestyle when a woman from his past calls with the news that he has—wait for it—unknowingly fathered her child. This book is all about the sex, and Tyree's attempts to hang a plot on the carnal gymnastics only muck up the works. 11-city author tour. (July)