American Blood

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. [em](Nov.) [/em]