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.

Thus begins Steve Piacente’s new novel, Pretender.

Steve, a former award-winning journalist, is also the author of Bella and its prequel, Bootlicker. Bella, the story of a young widow's quest to find the truth about her husband's death on an Afghan battlefield, won a National Indie Excellence 2012 Book Award, and the Readers' Favorite 2012 Gold Medal for Dramatic Fiction. Bootlicker is the story of a dark secret that imperils the 1992 election that gave South Carolina its first black congressman since the Civil War. Bootlicker won the 2013 Readers Favorite Silver Medal for Southern Fiction.

But it all started for Steve way back 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, he didn't particularly like school. He liked baseball, egg rolls and comic books, and it was Superman that got him interested in reading and writing.

Raised in New York and educated in Washington, he 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 him presentable enough to send back to D.C., this time as correspondent for the Tampa Tribune. The job ended four years later, and he found himself in steep competition for a similar slot with the Charleston, S.C. paper.

He won the job, 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, his 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, he - by this time a father of three ravenous, athletic, college-bound children - found warmth in a little known federal agency. He began as a speechwriter and ended as head of the agency's web and social media teams. Today he is an author, communications trainer, certified life coach, and an associate professor.

Though Bella was his first real fiction, some thin-skinned politicians would say the stories he wrote were just as fabricated. In fact, no fiction bubbled up until he earned his license to write in the Johns Hopkins Masters program in 2000. During this time, he also reentered the classroom at American University, his alma mater, and began teaching journalism classes.

His insistence on clean, tight writing did no lasting harm to the three afore-mentioned children, now taxpaying adults in the fields of public relations, art therapy, and engineering. It wasn't until years later that he learned that the kids snuck secret help from their mom, Felicia Piacente, a former special education administrator in the Montgomery County (Md.) Public School System, and now one of the area's most popular yoga instructors.