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Kindle Edition Digital Ebook Purchas Details
  • B00D6NS2KS
  • pages
  • $
Ebook Details
  • 01/2023
  • 978-1461054962 B00D6NS2KS
  • 339 pages
  • $15.99
Ted Guevara
Author
True Feel
TRUE FEEL is a buckled sidewalk on which paraplegic Marion Rafino wheels through. He is casing a lurid killing in Texas, and the main suspect is exotic dancer Credence, his love interest. In the beginning, Marion claims: "I am a reporter for a major newspaper, capable of doing practically anything in my life. When I stumble upon a person whose face resembles a photo tucked in our murder file, the first thing I do is make my affection valid...and my investigation relentless." Credence upon meeting Marion says: "While at a boutique, I see this man in a wheelchair looking for scented soap. I lend a hand, of course. But, from a glance, he shies away. It is when I see him again at my workplace does he get into my business desperately." At the Chicago nightclub, a fellow reporter thinks she looks familiar and asks Marion to anticipate where they may have seen her before. Snapshots taken from Corpus Christi are reexamined. But they do not convince Marion. It just brings a dab of inquest every time he goes back to the nightclub. He discovers that Credence belongs to an entrepreneurial group that dances its way across the country. To make his urge whole, he travels down south to singlehandedly try to solve the murder. But does he find the pitfall he fears the most? If Credence is the girl in the picture, what then? Does he lose all hope, even in a medical frontier procedure that could make him walk again?
Reviews
Marion Rafino, the paraplegic journalist of Guevara’s grimily poetic crime novel (now in its second edition), is sharp-witted and insightful. Recently awarded with the Emery Award for his “electric blanket” style stories—as in they stir a warm feeling, even when the events they cover are wrenching—for the Chicago Tribune, he finds himself revisiting older pieces about a horrific Texas cold case with no strong leads in which women were torn in half. Soon, though, he’s jolted by a surprise: a photograph showing a potential witness, if not the culprit themselves. Days later, when his coworker takes him to a gentleman’s club, his journalistic streak is enraptured by one particular dancer, Credence, who looks shockingly similar to the person in the photograph.

Guevara (A Circle with Two Corners) likewise aspires to electric blanket lit, telling the story from a variety of perspectives (each chapter’s narrator is clearly marked) and investing in the textures of life of Marion and his everyday challenges, and in Credence, both romantic interest and suspect, as well as her cohort of dancers. The first person perspectives illuminate the lives of the cast (“Chelsea was my name then. It had a lot of that fantasy toy sound to it,” says a woman who now calls herself Neva, short for “Nevada”) and the crimes of the past. Marion’s own headspace is distant and observant of all around him, yet when he meets the dancer Credence he finds himself defending a woman he barely knows. “Who am I to judge, with no solid facts, a being I happen to ache for?” he asks.

Readers who love the romance of literate noir will find pleasure here. Guevara writes beautifully, though it can be challenging to put the puzzle pieces of the mystery into place, with leaps from past to present feeling jarring—readers will have to stay as sharp as an investigative journalist to keep up.

Takeaway: A humane noir finds a reporter is drawn to a dancer connected to murders.

Comparable Titles: Viking Hendricks, Andrew Vachss.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B+
Marketing copy: A-

Formats
Kindle Edition Digital Ebook Purchas Details
  • B00D6NS2KS
  • pages
  • $
Ebook Details
  • 01/2023
  • 978-1461054962 B00D6NS2KS
  • 339 pages
  • $15.99
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