Meet Alexandro, aka Alec, the lover, the gigolo, the rough-edged scoundrel who sanded and polished himself into the smooth, hard object of everyone's fascination-most of all Emily's. His daughter's.

As Alec lies dying in a Paris hospital of what will come to be known as AIDS, Emily tries on and inherits his cape of seduction and trade. Smooth Hard follows their separate, converging paths of curiosity and deception across a generation, through the light of self-discovery and into the dark shadows.

Fiction starts like a poem-with an urgent emotion, idea, truth, or inspiration. L. I. ter Meulen has found her novel's beginnings in issues of lust, desire, and promiscuity that may, or may not, be coupled with love and affection. Often, stories focused on sex and eroticism feature a narrowly defined sexual theme acted out by one-dimensional characters. Smooth Hard introduces a tapestry of characters whose exploits, explorations, and experimentation with love and sensuality intersect in surprising ways.