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Pretender
A disgraced journalist stumbles on a story that will let him reclaim his career, but redemption comes with a price: he must place his faith in the racist senator he once exposed as a murderer.
Must an act be illegal to be a crime? Who decides if the offender is worthy of forgiveness? Pretender explores the raw instincts that inform our choices and drive our actions, sometimes with consequences that span generations.
Must an act be illegal to be a crime? Who decides if the offender is worthy of forgiveness? Pretender explores the raw instincts that inform our choices and drive our actions, sometimes with consequences that span generations.
362 pages, Paperback
Published March 12, 2018
11 people want to read
About the author
Steve Piacente
7 books197 followersBella is the winner of a National Indie Excellence 2012 Book Award, and the Readers' Favorite 2012 Gold Medal for Dramatic Fiction. Bootlicker, the prequel to Bella, was published in September 2012 and is winner of the 2013 Readers' Favorite Silver Medal for Southern Fiction. Pretender (2018) explores the raw instincts that form our choices and drive our actions, sometimes with consequences that span generations.
But it all started for me in 1954.
Eisenhower was president, no one beat the Yankees, and Elvis was still an unknown. TV was three channels and two colors, black and white. Growing up, I didn’t particularly like school. I liked baseball, egg rolls and comic books, and it was Superman that got me interested in reading and writing.
Raised in New York and educated in Washington, I kept moving south after college, eventually learning all they left out at journalism school at the feet of street-smart newspaper editors in Florida and South Carolina.
In 1985, one of those editors found me presentable enough to send back to D.C., this time as correspondent for the Tampa Tribune. The job ended four years later, and I found myself in steep competition for a similar slot with the Charleston, S.C. paper. I remember pumping the Charleston editor’s hand and pleading, “Please don’t let me become a press secretary.”
The man was merciful, enabling nine more years of Washington reporting, and front row exposure to the real South, as Charleston is far deeper into Dixie than Tampa, geography be damned. As time wore on, my NY sensibilities blended with Southern convention to produce stories on intriguing topics such as public celebration of the Confederate flag, and segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond.
It was a great time until Charleston ran out of cash and shuttered its one-man D.C. bureau. Out in the cold, I - by this time a father of three ravenous, athletic, college-bound children - found warmth in a little known Federal agency called the U.S. General Services Administration. I began as a speechwriter and today head the agency’s web, new media, and graphics teams.
Though Bella is my first real fiction, some thin-skinned politicians would say the stories I wrote about them were just as fabricated. In fact, no fiction bubbled up until I earned my license to write in the Johns Hopkins Masters program in 2000. During this time, I also reentered the classroom at American University, my alma mater, and began teaching journalism classes.
My insistence on clean, tight writing did no lasting harm to the three afore-mentioned children, now taxpaying adults in the fields of public relations, web design, and engineering. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the kids snuck secret help from their mom, Felicia Piacente, a special education administrator in the Montgomery County (Md.) Public School System.
But it all started for me in 1954.
Eisenhower was president, no one beat the Yankees, and Elvis was still an unknown. TV was three channels and two colors, black and white. Growing up, I didn’t particularly like school. I liked baseball, egg rolls and comic books, and it was Superman that got me interested in reading and writing.
Raised in New York and educated in Washington, I kept moving south after college, eventually learning all they left out at journalism school at the feet of street-smart newspaper editors in Florida and South Carolina.
In 1985, one of those editors found me presentable enough to send back to D.C., this time as correspondent for the Tampa Tribune. The job ended four years later, and I found myself in steep competition for a similar slot with the Charleston, S.C. paper. I remember pumping the Charleston editor’s hand and pleading, “Please don’t let me become a press secretary.”
The man was merciful, enabling nine more years of Washington reporting, and front row exposure to the real South, as Charleston is far deeper into Dixie than Tampa, geography be damned. As time wore on, my NY sensibilities blended with Southern convention to produce stories on intriguing topics such as public celebration of the Confederate flag, and segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond.
It was a great time until Charleston ran out of cash and shuttered its one-man D.C. bureau. Out in the cold, I - by this time a father of three ravenous, athletic, college-bound children - found warmth in a little known Federal agency called the U.S. General Services Administration. I began as a speechwriter and today head the agency’s web, new media, and graphics teams.
Though Bella is my first real fiction, some thin-skinned politicians would say the stories I wrote about them were just as fabricated. In fact, no fiction bubbled up until I earned my license to write in the Johns Hopkins Masters program in 2000. During this time, I also reentered the classroom at American University, my alma mater, and began teaching journalism classes.
My insistence on clean, tight writing did no lasting harm to the three afore-mentioned children, now taxpaying adults in the fields of public relations, web design, and engineering. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the kids snuck secret help from their mom, Felicia Piacente, a special education administrator in the Montgomery County (Md.) Public School System.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 25, 2018
Author Piacente's third novel starring reporter Dan Patragno. Patragno is now a disgraced newspaper reporter, for being involved with his sources; however, his wife has taken him back and he is managing a laundromat in Washington D.C. It's now ten years after the story told in Piacente's Bootlicker, when he gets a completely unexpected call from a man he put in jail, who promises him a story. Patragno hopes this story can restore his credibility as a journalist, and travels south to hear the story, and it's a real doozy: the jailbird, a white supremacist, is dying and wants to make a confession about his past. The secret is so important that it can potentially alter an upcoming Senate election.
Piacente weaves in a number of historical events and personalities in race relations, both in the South as well as the Washington D.C. area and he develops a compelling, likable character in Haryette Coleman. The ethics of newspaper reporting remain a central theme in his novels.
Piacente weaves in a number of historical events and personalities in race relations, both in the South as well as the Washington D.C. area and he develops a compelling, likable character in Haryette Coleman. The ethics of newspaper reporting remain a central theme in his novels.
August 15, 2019
An engrossing story about forbidden love and betrayal, Piacente does a fantastic job of painting a tumultuous world in which his characters must confront both their deepest held beliefs. The Pretender gives us much food for thought in uncertain times.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews