Michael Hicks Thompson

What Sets Thompson Apart

“The faith themes are so masterfully woven in that those who aren't religious should simply find the novel to be top-notch suspense.”

That is Diane Gardner writing in ForeWord's Clarion Review about The Rector, and it is the single most commercially powerful sentence ever written about Thompson's work because it names the thing that separates his series from every other Christian mystery in existence.

“Thompson's engaging, high-energy Christian murder mystery gleefully mixes all the elements of a small-town murder mystery — gossip, foul play, backstabbing … more mysteries, hypocrisies, and dangers add to the intrigue. Thompson's tale looks intimately at what it means to function in a community — how a population can reveal and obscure the truth.”

— Publisher's Weekly

The Man Behind the Work

Thompson grew up in Yazoo County, Mississippi, population 310. He built a one-man ad agency from scratch to 87 employees in Memphis and Nashville, winning national and international creative awards before selling it in 2011. He founded Shepherd King Publishing in 2007. He holds a Master's in Mass Communication from the University of South Carolina. He served in military intelligence, is a former Kairos prison ministry member, a licensed sailboat captain, an honorary deputy sheriff in Mississippi and Tennessee, and a two-time Cuba mission trip veteran.

He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America, the American Christian Fiction Writers, the International Crime Writers Association, and the Southern Writers Association.

A Genre of His Own

Across his six published novels, including The Rector and The Actress in the Solo series set in the Mississippi Delta of the 1950s, he invented what may be the only genuine literary sub-genre in American Christian publishing today: a murder mystery structured as a biblical allegory, where Martha McRae investigates real crimes while the reader simultaneously watches Jesus, Martha of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, the Apostle Paul, and Satan move through a small Southern town in human form.

The Rector has won five major awards. The Actress won the Grand Prize at the International Kathryn C. Treat Award. A movie is being pursued for The Rector.