The Sniper’s Apprentice: Book One – The Making of a Ghost by Jim Young Churchill McCluskey was born with a steady hand and a restless heart. Raised in the Carolina backwoods on tales of Winston Churchill and war, he learns early that power and patience often share the same trigger. When love betrays him and a recruiter’s challenge sends him to Ft. Benning, Georgia, Churchill begins the transformation from gifted marksman to soldier—then to something else entirely. Under the guidance of Sergeant Harlan, a sniper who teaches him that stillness is its own weapon, Churchill finds clarity in the crosshairs and silence in the recoil. But when war takes his mentor, he returns home changed—half man, half myth. Back in the holler, where law travels slow and justice comes quicker from a rifle, the locals start whispering about a man who appears when trouble knocks. They call him The Ghost of the Hills. Fans of Cormac McCarthy, Jack Carr, and No Country for Old Men will feel at home in this hard-edged Southern tale of loyalty, loss, and the price of precision.