Tom Ellison

2 booksThrillerAdventureCrime Fiction

Tom Ellison writes from Northern California, where the pasture is quieter than the decades he lived through. Raised in West Texas and shaped by barns, show rings, and the long migration west, he has spent a lifetime with horses and with the people who stayed when the world did not. BAREBACK is his account of that journey: family, found family, the AIDS years, and the stubborn work of remaining. He lives near the sanctuary he built, still listening for hooves.

Books

THE TIBETAN SON

A father's fight to save the son he never knew existed.

Thriller
Adventure
Crime Fiction

In a freezing Beijing alley, former Navy SEAL Chad Stringfellow gives his silver-framed photograph to the woman he loves, promising to return. He never makes it back. Ling, disowned by her elite political father for carrying an American drifter's child, dies alone in a charity ward after giving birth to a son named Guo Ling. Her last act is to place Chad's photograph in the infant's hand. Raised in a brutal welfare orphanage, Guo Ling survives by honing his body and mind in secret. When a Tibetan lama identifies the boy as the reincarnated Dalai Lama, the Ministry of State Security mobilizes to eliminate or capture the unauthorized child. Guo Ling escapes — stowing away in the cargo hold of a flight to Los Angeles, using yogic breathing to survive the freezing, oxygen-starved journey. In California, Chad learns his son is alive — and that Chinese operatives are already hunting him. Together with a streetwise runaway named Kit and a Tibetan lama, Chad must navigate a world of underground tunnels, lethal snatch squads, and a federal courtroom to bring his son home. The Tibetan Son is a pulse-pounding thriller about sacrifice, survival, and the unbreakable bond between a father and the son he will do anything to save.

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BAREBACK

Horses, Hollywood, and the long ride through loss toward sanctuary

Non-Fiction
Literary Fiction

Based on true events, BAREBACK follows Tommy from a West Texas childhood of an alcoholic mother and a distant father into the only place that ever felt honest: the back of a horse. A gifted bareback and show-jumping rider, he survives brutal barns, the death of a beloved mare, and the grind of competition. Mentor Dick Clayton and actor Tab Hunter pull him west to California, into film, found family, and the complicated freedom of being a gay man across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Then the epidemic. Friends and brothers vanish. Tommy tests positive. A catastrophic riding injury nearly ends him. Betrayal in love almost finishes the rest. This is not a tidy triumph story. It is a memoir of grit, horses, Hollywood, grief, and the stubborn work of staying alive until a Northern California sanctuary can hold him—and the spirits of the men and animals who got him there.

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