The Kraus Inheritance (RuneSlinger - Book 1)

Thomas O'Reilly didn't know anything about magic when they locked him up. He was twenty-two years old, a working-class kid from Parkdale, railroaded as a wheelman in a robbery he didn't plan. Ten years at Central North Correctional Centre. The plan was to keep his head down, do his time, get out.

Then the old Nazi in the cell next to his started dying.

Gustav Kraus had spent fifty years weaving chaos magic into his skin, his blood, and the bones of a brutal occult practice. When he crossed over, he didn't take it with him. The power jumped—to the dumb Irish kid with Nordic tattoos he'd had inked at nineteen because Vikings looked badass. Turns out the ink chose him.

Now Thor O'Reilly has a problem.

He's sitting on a reservoir of chaos magic he doesn't understand, in a prison full of men who will absolutely kill him for it, with no mentor, no grimoire, and no idea what he's doing. What he does have: working-class stubbornness, a set of runes tattooed on his arms that are starting to mean something, and the dawning realization that this power needs rules—or it will eat him alive.

Magic in prison doesn't look like wands and incantations. It looks like protection sigils scratched into a bunk frame with a broken pen. Love spells bartered for commissary. Wards built from blood and desperation at three in the morning when someone's trying to kick your door in. It looks like Thor building something from nothing, one working at a time, in the hardest possible classroom.

But power attracts attention. The Brotherhood sees a useful asset. The Latin Kings see a problem. And somewhere in the population is a man who wants a very specific kind of job done—the kind Thor refuses to do, no matter the price. The kind that costs him everything anyway.

The Kraus Inheritance is the first book in the RuneSlinger series: eight books following Thor O'Reilly from terrified fish to master practitioner, set inside the hidden magical ecosystem of Ontario's correctional system. It's an urban fantasy grounded in prison reality—gritty, dark, often funny, and built on a simple question: What kind of witch do you choose to be when the stakes are life and death?

Six principles. One ethical line Thor won't cross. And eight years left to serve.

"Hogwarts with shivs."