THE PROPHET’S
BRAND

New Mexico Territory, 1880.

The brand burns against Elias Shaw’s chest like a coal that never cools.

Eight years ago, he was taken from the life he knew and marked against his will — a serpentine brand seared into his flesh during a ceremony that fused ancient ritual with corrupted faith. The cult called it divine selection. Elias called it blasphemy. He’s been running ever since.

But the brand has a purpose. Beneath the New Mexico desert, something old and hungry stirs — entities that have fed on corrupted faith for two centuries, growing stronger as the Spanish mission network that once contained them crumbled to dust.

With federal cavalry closing in, three competing factions converging on the same ridge, and an ancient intelligence trying to corrupt the one man capable of stopping it, Elias Shaw has one week to decide what he truly believes about divine fire — and whether he’s willing to use it.

Clara Vale’s Journal

Long before she carried a gun for hire, Clara kept a record of what she found in the New Mexico Territory — sketches, notes, and the artifacts that didn’t fit the official histories.

The brand, and the territory it was meant to guard.

The Elias Shaw Series

A man across the post-Civil War American Southwest, carrying divine fire he never asked for — and every reason to question the god who gave it.

About Michael James

Michael James is not the author you’d expect to write a supernatural Western thriller.

He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, hated reading as a kid, and spent the better part of his childhood being bribed by his parents to finish a book. He went into sales, then finance, and figured that was that.

Then he saw The Da Vinci Code in theaters and walked out needing to know what happened next. He found the Dan Brown novels, read every one, and something shifted. The same thing happened years later with the Reacher series on Amazon — he started the Lee Child books and couldn’t stop. What he responded to in both was the same thing: tight chapters, relentless pacing, deep research worn lightly, and the pull of always needing to know what comes next. That’s the kind of writer he set out to become.

The Prophet’s Brand has been a year and a half in the making, built on serious research into the post-Civil War American Southwest — a place and era he finds endlessly compelling. Simple in some ways. Strange in others. Full of the kind of history that doesn’t make it into textbooks.

Michael James lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children. He is currently writing the second book in the Elias Shaw Series.

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