John A. Bray served for seventeen years in the New York City Police Department and took early retirement with the rank of lieutenant in 1976. While in the Police Department, he acquired a Bachelor of Science degree from John Jay College and a Juris Doctor degree from Brooklyn Law School. After admission to the Bar, he served for four years as a prosecutor in the Department's internal disciplinary system.

After leaving the NYPD, John practiced criminal defense law on Long Island and in New York City for 30 years. In 2004, he received a Master of Arts degree in Theology from the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, Long Island. Now fully retired, he lives with his wife Vera in Williamsburg, VA, where he currently serves as Past President of the Chesapeake Bay Writers Chapter of the Virginia Writers Club. Code Name: Caleb is Bray's third novel and the sequel to The Ballad of Johnny Madigan, his first novel.

The Code Name: Caleb <> Buy this book   

Young and penniless Johnny Madigan lied about his age to become a Union Soldier. And after surviving serious injury on the Civil War’s most notorious and blood-soaked killing fields, was recruited to work under cover to infiltrate Confederate spy rings.

In this sequel to the acclaimed Ballad of Johnny Madigan, Johnny – older than his years, but much younger than believed by the army, battle-hardened and a master of espionage – is sent back to New York to penetrate an underground counterfeiting gang supplying forged US currency the enemy South.

His assignment takes him to Canada where a murderous Confederate spy ring is plotting an armed uprising to take over New York City and hold it hostage.

Johnny’s dream is to return to childhood sweetheart, Deidre, who kept him alive as a destitute youth in the city’s slums, but there is more than the daily risk of sudden death keeping him from her as he enters the very heart of the conspiracy. Suspected by some plotters, he is seduced by a beautiful woman – herself a key member of the gang – whose orders are to expose him.

Will the war-toughened, but still romantically naïve, Johnny see through sexy Letitia’s love ploy to complete and survive his vital mission and to be re-united with Deidre, or can the conspirators lower his guard with Letitia’s wily help, make their bold, history-changing plan succeed … and see Johnny dead?

John Bray’s immaculately researched and race-paced ‘Code Name: Caleb’ thrusts the reader into the murky depths of intrigue, plot and counter-plot that became the dark underside of the War Between the States.

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The Confidential <> Buy this book    Interview

Dante Falconieri lives in the murky shadows, assigned to the dirtiest undercover job of all … trapping fellow cops on the take from crime lords.

Dante is the guardian who guards the guardians.

But who guards Dante, the lone wolf and the wild card?

He's cynical and disillusioned. His promotion's stalled. He craves to return to the narcotics stings that made him among the best undercover men of the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency. He's weary and needs a vacation. His cop-on-cop busts have led him to mistrust his bosses, their bosses, his closest partners, district attorneys, and the Joint Federal, State and City crack task force to which he's on loan for the biggest sting of all.

His trophy girlfriend needs much more than his agent's pay check can buy. And what comfort he has left – this all-consuming passion for Mina – is threatened by his code of secrecy, his unexplained, mysterious midnight disappearances from her bed at a bleep of his phone, and his shallow pockets.

His mind and his devotion to justice are showing cracks as subtly visible as those that felled the House of Usher.

Can Dante himself be trusted, or can he be turned to the dark side by the very villains he's dedicated his life to putting behind bars … or consigning to hell? They're trying hard, and disheartened Dante is a desperate man. Open to temptation?

Author John Bray is a 17-year NYPD vet, who retired as a lieutenant attorney prosecutor and took early retirement to become a crime lawyer before becoming a full-time author. He knows what makes the man who is coded by investigation-hardened insiders as 'The Confidential'.

This Byzantine tale of intrigue and cunning deception twists and turns at every flip of the page, building to a climax that will leave you wiser – wise enough to be scared stiff. Dante is a beautifully flawed anti-hero … an irresistible character you'd never want to meet, but who you can't wait to read more of. Paperback or Kindle

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Johnny Madigan’s journey starts with a lie – then life presents him with the reality of its most terrible truths.

The lie is told to a Union Army recruiting sergeant on the dockside when Johnny – orphaned, penniless and barely sixteen years old – blushingly claims to be eighteen to join up and march to war.

It’s Johnny’s first and last lie. And it almost costs him his life, time and time again. Will his next brush with death be his last?

There is no room for make-believe on the blood-soaked killing fields of the bitter battle between the states. He becomes a reluctant killer … and a mourner, as close friends in blue and stranger-boys in gray are scythed down by the pitiless and ravenous reaper of young lives and innocent dreams.

But it is a dream that sustains Johnny: A young girl who showed kindness to him back in the slums of New York City.

As the mini balls and shells take their awful toll, as he suffers capture, as he struggles to live through the ordeal of a gruesome makeshift hospital, as he plays the deadly game of undercover work to expose a nest of enemy plotters, Johnny has two questions burning in his mind …

Can he survive? And if he can, will he return home in time to thwart his sweetheart’s mother’s plan for her to become a nun?

John Bray takes no prisoners in this disturbingly detailed telling of the ordeals of that cruelest of all conflicts – civil war. As the pages turn, the reader can only hope that Johnny will survive against all odds, that his endearing innocence will somehow escape being slain or maimed in the bloodbath, that he will save Deidre from life behind a convent’s walls. This is a tale terrible yet tender, brutal yet beautiful.

Endorsement

"Had The Ballad of Johnny Madigan been written 100 years ago, I have no doubt it would already be an American classic and  have been filmed half a dozen times. Because it’s so recently created, it will take a little time for us to establish it as such (and you don’t have to be dead). Your book seems to go further – much further – than anything I’ve come across; even Red Badge.  The movie Cold Mountain hardly compares. A magnificent job of work, John." -- Neil Marr, BeWrite Books