“Seizes the reader’s attention like the final stroke of the doomsday clock…Bud Gundy imbues his story with a hurtling urgency…The writing is masterful and sagacious from first to last.”
- Kyle Thomas Smith, author of 85A and Cockloft: Scenes From a Gay Marriage
by Bud Gundy
action adventure, paranormal, urban fantasy, romance
Pre-order at Bold Strokes Books
Released June 1, 2019
Intelligent, handsome, and struggling to make his rent, thirty-year-old Drew Morten loses his only meaningful relationship when his grandmother dies. A famous television anchor, Claudia Trenton leaves Drew the legacy of her secret memoir. From the fate of a vanished medieval prince to a top-secret NASA study about a mystifying space object, her unreported discoveries hum with wonder.
But history merges with the present and upends Drew’s life when he has a terrifying revelation. Teaming up with a brilliant woman who receives the same vision and a handsome man whose arrival is either fortuitous or sinister, Drew follows the clues in his grandmother’s memoir and races against time to save the world from an apocalyptic nightmare about to be unleashed in downtown San Francisco.
As catastrophe looms, so does the question: Who, or what, is the real enemy?
Advance praise for Accidental Prophet:
To an age where Russian agents are now household names and dystopia is just a click away, comes a revelatory novel that seizes the reader’s attention like the final stroke of the doomsday clock. At first, Drew is just one more guy trying to find love and make ends meet, all while caring for his hospice-bound grandmother Claudia, in the Bay Area. After he lays Claudia to rest, however, Drew honors her wish to read her unpublished memoir of her days as a pioneering newswoman, only to find a prophecy embedded in its pages—a prophecy that Armageddon is nigh unless her grandson, the Accidental Prophet, can find his tribe and access the supernatural capacities they all share. Right away, the Visions start kicking in for Drew. Through sudden clairvoyance, he discovers that the Kremlin has trained a spy named Victor from boyhood to hack Silicon Valley and bring the nation and the world to ruin. He also discovers that his late-grandmother’s hospice nurse Tisha, a PhD candidate in physics, is also vested with these visions and shares Drew’s newly acquired powers to almost automatically heal from burns and all but a few other forms of injury. Along the way, he falls in love with an upwardly mobile techie named Tom, only to realize that Tom has a past whose implications could destroy more than just their love affair. Yet this rundown does not do justice to the immense complexity of the forces marshaling against the characters, nor the intricate webs that bind their fate. More impressive still is how Bud Gundy imbues his story with a hurtling urgency, all while setting it within a rich and subtle historical framework that spans from Medieval Brittany to 1970s New York to Harvey Milk-era San Francisco to the tech boom that could spell renaissance or ruin for our civilization. The writing is masterful and sagacious from first to last.
- Kyle Thomas Smith, author of 85A and Cockloft: Scenes From a Gay Marriage
