Faith Under Fire

Inside the book

The story begins here.

He laid that name down fifteen years ago. He is about to take it up again.

From Christopher Ray, author of the Eli Creed trilogy and the Walker Davis novels - a standalone literary Western about violence, marriage, and the cost of returning home.

The preacher at the lectern reads the Twenty-Third Psalm in a voice that does not waver. His congregation knows that voice. They do not know the man it used to belong to.

In the spring of 1888, in a small New Mexico town called Cottonwood, the Reverend Calvin Thompson buries his two sons.

The men who killed them rode in from the south country, did what they came to do, and rode back. They have never heard of Reverend Thompson. They have heard, from a distance and a long time ago, of someone called True Blue Cal.

He laid that name down fifteen years ago, on the night he settled a debt with a fourteen-year-old's father in a town called Sutter's Crossing. His wife married the preacher. His sons were born after. His daughter is four years old.

He is about to take that name up again.

FAITH UNDER FIRE is the story of one ride south across the border country after the Irish outlaw Charlie Callahan and his crew. It is told in the company of a deputy whose wife is at a window of her own, an aging Civil War sharpshooter who has buried his first wife and keeps his second, and a half-Mexican boy with a notebook who is going to write the book about the man with the eyes.

It is a novel about violence and marriage, faith and the carrying-forward of dead names, set in the dust and red mesa country of the New Mexico Territory and the cantinas and arroyos of northern Mexico. It is told in the patient voice of a man who knows the weight of every name he has carried - and the price every man pays who picks one up again.

For readers of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Paulette Jiles' News of the World, Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, and Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers.