How I became AN AUTHOR
Brett A. Murray grew up in the northeastern corner of Colorado, where the plains run flat toward the Nebraska line and the towns are small enough that everyone knows whose grandfather built what and whose family lost what and why. That landscape — its light, its silence, its particular way of keeping score — is where The Dragon's Lantern lives.
His writing started young. Two published poems in his early years, then the television station in his hometown, then college at Kansas Wesleyan University where he earned a B.A. in Communications, lettered in varsity basketball on a conference championship team, and served as Junior Class President. He was named the university's Outstanding Communication Student. He took every writing course the catalog offered, including advanced composition, which turned out to be exactly the right preparation for his evening job as a radio newsman.
At KINA 910 AM and KSAL 1150 AM in Salina, Kansas — Paul Harvey's station, where the standard for a sentence was whether it survived being read aloud in thirty seconds to people who were not paying close attention — Murray learned what writing under pressure actually means. Every word had to earn its place. The ones that didn't were gone. He carried that discipline out of the newsroom and into everything that came after.
His career moved into oil and gas, where he discovered that a man who can write a clear letter to a mineral owner can open doors that money alone cannot. He started as a landman at Anadarko Petroleum, navigating title curative in the DJ Basin. At Sundance Energy, a small Australian-listed company, he was promoted to Land Manager at twenty-seven and helped grow the company from a five-million-dollar debt position to a market capitalization of nearly five hundred million dollars by 2008. At Anschutz Exploration, the private company founded by Phil Anschutz, he was part of the team that executed a 1.4-billion-dollar divestiture of Southern Bakken properties to Occidental Petroleum and a 114-million-dollar Northern Bakken sale to Crescent Pointe Energy. At Gunnison Energy, an Oxbow Company under the ownership of William Koch, he managed more than 150,000 net acres with multiple midstream facilities.
Throughout these years he wrote. Investor presentations. Shareholder communications. Press releases. The kind of writing where imprecision has a dollar cost. He served as COO and Board Member at Virtus Oil and Gas Corporation alongside Jim Gibbons, former Governor and Congressman of Nevada. His board service has included Houston Power Associates, where he served alongside Stephen Naeve, former CEO of Reliant Energy, and Kansas Wesleyan University, where he served alongside William Graves, former Governor of Kansas. He currently serves as Founder and CEO of Odin Biogas, a ClimateTech company focused on renewable energy development in the American heartland.
But the novel was always underneath all of it.
The man at its center — Will Richter — is based on a real figure from northeastern Colorado whose name Murray grew up hearing around kitchen tables. His grandmothers, Audrey and Betty, had known him and understood him the way women in small towns understand the powerful men around them: clearly, without illusion, and without anyone asking them to say what they saw. Murray spent years collecting their stories. In 1998 he sat down with the local tv station and conducted four one-hour interviews with people who had known the real Will personally. In 2005, living in New Mexico with his uncle Dennis, he wrote the first ninety pages of notes. They met with some of the people who appear, in altered form, in the novel itself.
Then life intervened the way it does. Three sons to raise. Companies to run. The notes sat.
Uncle Dennis died a little over two years ago.
Murray went back to the manuscript and did not really stop. He wrote in the late hours, after the house went quiet, in the focused state of a man who understands that some things have a deadline he did not set. The book grew from ninety pages of notes into something larger and more honest than the version he had imagined for two decades. Murray even wore out not one but two office chairs during this time.
His literary compass throughout pointed at three writers. John Steinbeck, for the way the land itself becomes a moral force in a story. Philipp Meyer, for the willingness to look at American violence and American ambition without softening either. And Ernest Hemingway, whose influence arrived at a turning point. Murray had written an early version of the manuscript that showed its work too much — his own word for it was that he was striving to demonstrate an intellect. He put the draft down for a month and read Hemingway. When he came back to it, he understood what had to change. The goal was not to describe everything. The goal was to describe enough that the reader's imagination completes the sentence. Trust the scene. Get out of the way.
He is a patron of the arts, a lifelong upland bird hunter, and a man who believes that the northeastern Colorado plains — flat, stubborn, and largely ignored by the literary world — have a story worth telling at full length.
The Dragon's Lantern is the first book of the Spirit Tree trilogy.
WRITINGS
Dragon's Lantern
A Novel by Brett A. Murray | 82,000 words
His cufflinks read W.A.R. The town read it as progress.
SYNOPSIS
WILLIAM ALBERT RICHTER is the most powerful man in Ward County, Colorado — bank president, power broker, and the undisputed king of the high eastern plains. He holds the mortgages on half the farms, controls the water rights, owns the newspaper, and built the schools. When he funded those schools, he had one condition: the teams would no longer be the Pirates and the colors would no longer be blue and white. From now on they are the Dragons. Green and gold. Banker’s colors, he used to brag — though the name had another meaning entirely, one Spirit Tree understood and did not speak aloud. Will Richter is the Grand Dragon.
When the lantern burns above the rose garden at Richter Manor after dark, the town knows and fears what it means: Klan meeting tonight. They call it the Dragon’s Lantern — his lantern, his signal, his brand burned into the skin of this town as surely as his name on every deed and deed of trust in the county. He built his empire the way all empires are built: one quiet theft at a time. Land seized through fraudulent deeds. Water locked up through a New Deal dam he positioned before Washington knew it wanted one. The Klan chapter he commands gives him something no deed or ledger can: the power to make men afraid.
Behind him stands EUGENE, his attorney and the architect of every crooked deed — and BETTY, his bookkeeper, who keeps the real records not in any file but in her head, her eyes, and a silence she has maintained for thirty years. His mother FRANCIS lives in the white cottage across from the golf course and is the only soul in Ward County he cannot buy, outlast, or silence. She tells him the truth. He has never found a way to stop her.
Then there is BAMBI — not the scandal Spirit Tree takes her for, but something far more dangerous. She has spent twenty years moving through Will’s world, warm and unhurried, learning the shape of everything he owns. Will believes she is his greatest asset. He is not entirely wrong. But Bambi has always been keeping her own count.
And there is Sheriff PALENSKE — a man who could have been something else entirely, who became instead the law Will needed: present at every dark hour, badge gleaming beneath the robe, looking the other way at the right moment and in the right direction. A decent man, people say. Spirit Tree has always been good at that particular lie.
A lynching. A war. A Denver mob. Federal investigators. Three bullets through Will’s Cadillac on a Sunday morning. And beneath it all, a town that has traded its silence for prosperity and is beginning to wonder, after all these years, whether it got a fair price.
Will Richter has survived everything this county and this century have thrown at him. Whether he deserves to — and what Spirit Tree will make of the man when the ledger finally closes — is the question this novel refuses to answer simply.
The ending will surprise you. It surprised the town.
Dragon's Legacy
A Novel by Brett A. Murray | XX,000 words
For fifty years, a dead banker’s trust builds Spirit Tree—yet some wonder if the town is thriving… or cursed.
SYNOPSIS
Dragon’s Legacy
After the death of Will Richter, the most powerful man Spirit Tree had ever known, the town believes his era has ended.
Instead, his influence only grows stronger.
Through the massive trust he left behind, Richter’s wealth quietly reshapes the town for the next fifty years. From 1970 to 2020, Spirit Tree flourishes in ways most rural communities can only dream about. The trust funds schools, churches, scholarships, and civic projects—including an indoor swimming pool, a 500-seat auditorium, and a massive fairground arena that brings new life to the town.
To outsiders, Spirit Tree looks like a model of small-town prosperity.
But beneath the generosity lies something far more complicated.
The trust doesn’t just fund the town—it quietly guides it. Elections tilt a certain way. School boards fall into line. Even the churches seem to understand where their support comes from. Over time, the people of Spirit Tree learn not to ask too many questions.
Then the tragedies begin.
Across five decades, strange misfortunes and dark events follow the town like a shadow. Each time, the community closes ranks, grateful for the prosperity that continues to flow from Richter’s fortune.
After all, plenty of towns would gladly accept the same gifts.
But as a new generation begins to look back at how the town’s wealth was truly built, a question no one wants to answer begins to surface:
Is Spirit Tree blessed by Will Richter’s legacy…
—or cursed by the blood money that built it?
Dragon's Pride
A Novel by Brett A. Murray | XX,000 words
In Spirit Tree, Rooster wears the badge—but Bambi steals the show.
SYNOPSIS
Dragon’s Pride
Everyone in Spirit Tree knows the name Will Richter.
But the town also knows two other names just as well—Bambi Collins and Sheriff Rooster Palenske.
Bambi was the blonde who could turn heads walking down Main Street before most people had finished their morning coffee. Beautiful, sharp, and far smarter than people gave her credit for, she learned early how life worked in a small prairie town. What began as a quiet relationship with the richest man in Spirit Tree eventually gave her the freedom to build a life on her own terms.
Rooster Palenske’s story is just as unlikely. A tall, broad-shouldered cowboy with an easy smile, he became sheriff at a young age thanks in part to Will Richter’s backing. But Rooster knew a badge meant more than who helped you get it—it meant showing up every day and earning the trust of the people who knew you by your first name.
Together, Bambi and Rooster move through the rhythms of small-town life in Spirit Tree, where everybody knows everybody, neighbors still wave from their trucks on dirt roads, and news travels faster than the wind across the prairie. There are county fairs, high school games under bright Friday night lights, gossip at the Sweet Shop, and quiet evenings in rose gardens where the whole town seems to slow down.
Unlike the darker chapters of Spirit Tree’s history, Dragon’s Pride is about the lighter side of life—the friendships, laughter, and small moments that make a town feel like home. It’s the story of two people who grew up in the shadow of power but discovered that happiness often comes from simpler things.
Because in Spirit Tree, success isn’t just measured in money or influence.
Sometimes it’s measured in neighbors, laughter, and the kind of life that only a small town can give.
Dragon's Gambit
A Novel by Brett A. Murray | XX,000 words
In Denver’s golden years, the Smaldones ran the table—until the law finally called the bet.
SYNOPSIS
Dragon’s Gambit
After Will Richter’s death, the power that once shaped Spirit Tree begins to shift west—to Denver.
Dragon’s Gambit follows Tony Geneva and the mysterious Injun Joe as they rise through the ranks of the Smaldone organization, the crime family that quietly controlled much of Colorado’s underworld for decades. Working in the shadow of the Brown Palace and the smoky back rooms of Denver’s old restaurants and social clubs, they see firsthand how power really moved through the city.
But this isn’t just a story about crime.
It’s also a story about Denver itself.
Through Tony and Joe’s eyes, readers step into the city during its golden years—when fine dining, jazz clubs, and elegant hotel bars helped transform Denver from a rough western cow town into the confident, thriving city it would become. Deals were made over steak dinners, friendships were forged in dimly lit restaurants, and influence often carried more weight than the law.
From the early 1970s through the final days of the Smaldone empire, Tony and Joe witness how a small group of men could shape politics, business, and the direction of an entire state.
But every run eventually comes to an end.
And when the Smaldones are finally pinched, the men who lived inside that world must decide whether loyalty is worth the cost.
TITANS
A Novel by Brett A. Murray | XX,000 words
In a world where billionaires control the game, the fixer who knows their secrets is often the reason they rise to the top—and stay there.
SYNOPSIS
TITANS
Bart Mercer started as a young landman chasing leases across the dusty oil fields of New Mexico and Texas. What he didn’t realize was that the work would pull him into the orbit of some of the most powerful men in the energy business.
As Mercer’s reputation grows, so do the stakes. He eventually finds himself in Denver, working for billionaires who control vast fortunes in oil, gas, and other ventures. In their world, deals are rarely clean, loyalties shift quickly, and the real game is played far from public view.
From smoky back rooms to marble boardrooms, Mercer watches how the titans of industry actually operate. Land deals, political favors, quiet partnerships, and calculated risks all become part of the machinery that builds empires.
Along the way he learns the rules that no one writes down: money stacks the deck, power protects its own, and winning often depends on seeing the move before anyone else does.
As Mercer sharpens his instincts and proves his value, the same billionaires who once overlooked him begin asking for him by name. But the closer he gets to the top of the game, the clearer it becomes that the world of Titans is filled with ambition, scandal, and men who will do almost anything to stay on top.