American Blood

September 7, 2015
New Zealander Sanders (The Fallen) makes his U.S. debut with an underwhelming crime novel featuring a former NYPD detective living as Marshall Grade under Witness Protection in Albuquerque, N.Mex. Marshall once worked Brooklyn narcotics, until he got in too deep with a nasty crime boss—and his lethally attractive daughter—and blew his cover. Now Marshall glides by under the radar, leaving no paper trail. His WITSEC handler, the genial Texas-born marshal Lucas Cohen, doesn’t worry about his charge’s indiscretions, like subletting his home to stay off the books. But when Marshall antagonizes two known felons, Cyrus Bolt and Troy Rojas, he stirs up a hornet’s nest, all because a young woman, Alyce Ray, is missing, and she reminds him of someone he used to know. Readers will struggle to understand Marshall’s motives as he cuts a bloody swath across the city and the surrounding area in his pursuit of Bolt and Rojas and their gang of violent thugs. Sanders can write an action-packed scene, but his characters are thin.

October 1, 2015
From the opening lines of American Blood you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller. New Zealand author Ben Sanders (‘The Auckland Trilogy’) throws the reader into the belly of the story, and you’re doing well if you can keep up with the rapid twists as the tale unfolds. After a botched assignment, ex-NYPD officer and undercover cop Marshall Grade is in hiding with the assistance of the witness protection program, but he’s soon in a whole new world of trouble when he starts looking for a missing woman. The shady characters Marshall encounters seem all too familiar as his past life comes back to show its hand. In keeping with the noir genre, the language is suitably slick, the dialogue is smart and the pace is cracking. This hardboiled novel is so filmic that it’s no surprise there is already a film in the works. With its impressive body count, American Blood is attracting comparisons with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. It will appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy and those who love their crime and thriller writing hardboiled. Deborah Crabtree is a Melbourne-based writer and bookseller