Branded: An Erotic Story of Lies, Deceit, Greed, Blackmail, and Murder

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Maya Towers

Ellen Turner arrives in Branded already knowing something most people spend years learning the hard way: that desire is a form of power, and power is what she intends to have. At eighteen she grasps a lesson that will shape every decision that follows, that seduction is not about attraction but about control. From that moment forward, Michael Solomon’s novel becomes a portrait of a woman who has turned that insight into an art form and built an empire on it.

The world Solomon places Ellen in is corporate America at its most glamorous and predatory. She moves through it with patience and precision, studying the executives around her, mapping their ambitions and vulnerabilities, giving each man just enough to believe he is the one with the advantage. It is a performance of extraordinary discipline, and Solomon renders it with the cool intelligence the character demands. Ellen is not simply scheming. She is surviving, and the novel is careful to let readers feel the difference even when it unsettles them.

The danger arrives in the form of a man from before the wealth and the carefully maintained image, a former lover who remembers her when she was someone else. He is not easily charmed or dismissed, and his reappearance sets the novel’s second engine running. What began as ambition becomes something more urgent, and the choices Ellen faces stop being calculated and start being desperate. The tension of that transition is where Branded does its most compelling work.

Solomon does not ask readers to admire Ellen, but he makes it nearly impossible not to find her fascinating. She lives in the uneasy space between heroine and villain, and that moral ambiguity is the book’s real subject. Behind the ruthlessness there are glimpses of the frightened young woman she once was, and those glimpses make her choices feel earned rather than monstrous.

Fast-paced, seductive, and built around a genuinely dangerous woman, Branded keeps its moral questions open until the final page. Ellen Turner is exactly the kind of character you cannot stop watching.

About the Author

Michael Solomon

Michael Solomon is a former NYPD investigator, bestselling author, national speaker, and business consultant with an extraordinary life story. A survivor of two assassination attempts, he served as an intelligence officer for the U.S. State Department, participated in international treaty negotiations, and provided personal security for prominent world figures. During his police career, he identified a flaw in New York City's payroll procedures, helping save taxpayers more than $120 million.

With degrees in Behavioral Sciences and Public Administration, Michael later built a successful business and became deeply involved in charitable work, earning recognition as Humanitarian of the Year from the New York State Legislature in 2003. He has appeared on more than 350 radio and television programs and has authored two bestselling books, including Success By Default and Where Did My America Go?. His first novel, The Conversion Prophecy, marks an exciting new chapter in his writing career, bringing his distinctive perspective and experience into fiction.