Rock Angel (Rock Angel Series Book 1)

Debut novelist Bogino clearly has a passion and great understanding of Nineties-era rock culture. Shan is a complex and well-written character whose struggles have the reader rooting for her.

Bogino portrays an authentic landscape of what it’s like to be a rock band in the early ’90s. Shan and Quinn both read as fully realized, flawed characters.

In a show-business tale filled with ego clashes, sexual tension, drug addiction, dreams of success and nightmares of stardom, the rarefied world of ambitious musicians is rendered with a relentlessly keen eye and ear.

I applaud Ms. Bogino’s brave portrayal of the music industry circa 1990 and anxiously await the next book.
Rock Angel
is a page turner that will cause you to suffer at least one book hangover—guaranteed!

Time was running out. The audition was that night and there were only a couple of hours left to prepare. Normally Shan could get by with a fraction of that, but the clinkers she was hitting today were glaring enough to set her teeth on edge.

She took a deep breath and hoisted Joanie into her lap, touching the guitar’s ebony fingerboard for reassurance. She could do this. She’d played the song a hundred times. She’d written it herself. Shan started again, fingers forming the opening chords with new resolve.

Another clam, this one even more strident than the last. She ignored the mistake and kept going, but had to stop in the middle of the next phrase when a fit of shivering seized her. The pick slipped from her fingers and dropped to the floor.

Shan set Joanie aside, then sank to her knees beside the futon she used as a bed. She laid her hands against the worn Mexican blanket, fingers spread, and stared down at them. She had small but capable hands, nails unpolished and filed sensibly short. They were guitar player hands, sturdy and limber, the pads of the fingertips on the left one layered with thick, neat calluses. They didn’t often fail her, but today they shook so hard she couldn’t hold on to the pick.

Well, this day of all days, her hands had to function. They, and she, had to be at their very best because she had a chance at landing the kind of gig she’d always wanted, in a band she’d normally get close to only after the price of admission.

It was a pure fluke that she’d scored the audition in the first place. She was a popular act at small venues, but acoustic folk at a coffee house was a long stretch from playing lead guitar in an up-and-coming rock band. The guys in the band were pros and she was a kid only just starting out, so she’d been shocked when she’d gotten the call from the band’s drummer the night before. Still, Shan was a quick study and that was what they needed, so she had a shot. A long shot, maybe, but a shot just the same.

She resolutely took up Joanie. She’d do this. She’d
make
herself do it. She began again, this time playing “Street Ballad,” one of her favorite originals. It always had a tonic effect on her.

Except today, apparently. Halfway through the opening riff, her gut began to roil. She gritted her teeth and tried to play through it, but her stomach heaved and she tasted bile at the back of her throat. She set the guitar down with a dissonant jangle and dashed for the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, Shan staggered back to her room and collapsed on the bed. Pulling the blanket over her head, she closed her eyes and tried to will away the tremors that quaked her limbs.

After a time, she reached for the phone, her hands still shaking.

Later that night, she was still shivering. Even her heavy sweatshirt couldn’t keep out the cold, because it wasn’t coming from the warm air of late May. It emanated from inside, a rank chill that made her limbs feel as icy and dead as frozen poultry parts.
Maybe that’s why they call it cold turkey.

She checked her watch. Almost nine. If she didn’t hurry she’d miss it, the audition she hoped would take her to a new place. Instead she was here at the old place: Jorge’s crack house in Spanish Harlem, a boarded-up derelict of a building as bleak and forlorn as the crackheads and junkies it housed.

She’d thought she was going to make it this time. She’d gone four days without a fix. Four endless, miserable, heroin-free days punctuated by bouts of shakes, cramps, and nausea. Diarrhea, too. Sometimes all four at once, but she’d forced herself to tough it out, at least until it became clear that she couldn’t pull off a performance in her present condition.

She could still make it. Shan took hold of her guitar and grasped the iron railing to pull herself to her feet, but another spasm shot through her abdomen. She doubled over until it passed.

Who was she kidding? She wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe she’d come because of the audition, but now she wasn’t leaving until she got what she came for—the big H.

She blinked, momentarily blinded by the headlights of a passing police car. She shrank back against the building and shut her eyes against the sudden glare that shot laser-sharp pinpoints into her brain. Then, in the cruiser’s wake, she heard footsteps crunching on the sidewalk.

Shan opened her eyes. A blurry silhouette materialized, gradually coalescing into the tall figure of a man. “Jorge?”

The figure stopped. “Hey, Shan,” he said, swaying. “Am I late?”

“Two hours.” She jumped to her feet, grabbing the railing again as her knees quavered. “You told me to come at seven, remember?”

“I guess.” He scratched his head. His black hair was limp and greasy. “You need something?”

“Why else would I call?”

He grinned and she saw he was minus a few teeth now. “I thought you missed me.”

Shan was seized with a fit of coughing, her slight shoulders hitching in time with her hacking. “Can I get something?” she asked, when she was able to speak. “I’m dope sick.”

He started up the stairs. Shan let go of the railing and followed him up the four flights to his apartment, Joanie clutched against her chest.

Once they were inside Jorge switched on the light. The harsh glow from the bare bulb assaulted Shan’s eyes and she ducked her head as he vanished into another room. She blinked, then moved toward a sagging couch of indeterminate color.

She set down her guitar case and sank onto the couch, the only piece of real furniture. There was a wooden crate that passed for a coffee table, its top littered with razor blades and rolling papers. Shan watched a cockroach nose its way across the scarred surface, long feelers quivering as it encountered a pizza crust amid the debris.

Jorge emerged from the other room with an enormous brown rock in his hands. In the bright light Shan could see that he looked far worse than the last time she’d seen him, just two weeks before. Since then his thinness had turned skeletal and his skin, always bad, had taken on a yellowish cast.