I didn’t really have a trilogy in mind when I began work on my first novel, Last One Chosen.

The task before me was simple. Write a book about a character who embodied true human values, place him in a life and death struggle against the forces of evil and see how things turn out.

Earlier this year Last One Chosen was selected as a Top Five Finalist as the Best Indie Book of 2012 in the thriller genre. Here’s how it kicked off.

Special Agent Quanah Parker Brown parked his black, windowless Ford Econoline van in front of a small, white frame house in a sleepy neighborhood in Kilgore, Texas.  He racked the slide to chamber a round in his Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol and prepared to arrest or kill the person identified by intelligence reports as the most dangerous man on the planet.

By the time I finished the book, I had experienced what many writers have, I couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing some of those characters again.

To remedy this, I brought some of them back in Next Best Hope, a  story about the nasty intersection of faith and politics. Poet and author Jo VonBargen described the book like this in her review.

…the story moves along at breathless speed, each chapter more dire than the last. One almost needs an oxygen tank. I won’t go into the brilliance of plot, the exquisiteness of language, or any of those things others have already said. It’s all there; it’s all perfectly there. Ultimately the purpose of reading, for me, is to learn and to feel something of the author’s spirit and worldview during the act of creation. I learned. I deeply felt. I’m still free-falling toward a vastly changed home turf, out of that rose-colored glider from which Stephen Woodfin so ably and purposefully shoved me.

I still couldn’t shake the group of people who haunted me.

By this time, as a result of my study of digital publishing, I had come to understand that books often come best in threes. It seems there is something about a three-part series that gives it a sense of completeness, a feeling that things have come full circle, or at least come as as far as they can.

With The Revelation Effect, I turned the heat up one more notch. As the product description in the Amazon store says, “The body count increases as faith and politics collide.”  It is a tale of home-grown terrorism fired by religious fanaticism. Historical fiction author Jack Durish wrote this in his five-star review:

What scares you? What makes your spine tingle? Ghosties? Ghoulies? Long-legged beasties? Things that go bump in the night? Stephen Woodfin found my special kind of terror. People who wish to impose their beliefs on me and will resort to any kind of terror to accomplish their ends. Yes, we live in the kind of times that hold a special terror for me, and Woodfin has found a unique way of examining it. He drives his story into the troubled waters of religious fanaticism and expertly avoids the shoals of prejudice by employing religious extremists of the Christian rather than the Muslim persuasion.

So, if you want to take a break from zombies and werewolves for a little while, please stop by the Kindle store, maybe download a sample, or just bite the bullet and buy the Revelation Trilogy.

I wouldn’t mind.

(Stephen Woodfin is an attorney and author of legal thrillers. Click here to see the full collection of his works on His Amazon author page.)