Ben Sanders quickly made his entry onto my “must read” list of authors on the strength of AMERICAN BLOOD and MARSHALL’S LAW. His latest offering, THE STAKES, takes place outside of his Marshall Grade mythos and has him turning his fine and talented hand to the caper subgenre with excellent results, creating from the ground up another complex yet sympathetic character in the form of NYPD detective Miles Keller.

THE STAKES introduces Keller at a point in time when he is on administrative leave while he is being investigated for fatally shooting a hitman named Jack Deen. Keller’s actions appear on the surface to have been righteous, but there is just enough trace evidence to raise suspicion that things did not go down quite in the manner in which he described them. That suspicion is correct, but not for the reasons that the police investigators are checking out.

"I love caper novels, and this one is particularly well done. Sanders puts readers in the mind of Elmore Leonard and occasionally Wallace Stroby, though it is his own unique voice and flashes of terrific prose that ultimately shine through."

Keller, as we quickly learn in the opening pages (following an intriguing vignette), is bent though not broken. He is not above helping himself to the ill-gotten gain of those on the wrong side of the law, even if it involves crossing over to that side (however momentarily) to do so. So it happens that Keller interjects himself into a money transfer and finds himself all the richer for it, his mood improved by the fact that no was injured in the process. But when the folks whose load he lightened turn up murdered the next morning, it complicates matters.

Meanwhile, a woman named Nina Stone suddenly reappears in New York. Nina and Keller had a history several years before when her name came up in the middle of a robbery investigation. Now she is back in his circle, on the run from her husband, L.A. crime boss Charles Stone, who uses his film studio as a cover. Charles sends a quietly competent gunsel to New York to retrieve Nina and bring her back to California.

The gunsel, whose attraction to Nina is one of his own worst-kept secrets, is Bobby Dean, the cousin of the hitman who Keller shot and killed. Bobby, of course, is interested in getting payback for Jack, and when he discovers that Keller is in her circle, he looks at the job as a golden opportunity to get on Nina’s good side, make some money and get revenge all in one fell swoop. But it’s not going to be anywhere near that easy for anyone, except maybe for Nina, who is almost always a step or two ahead of everyone else. Almost.

I love caper novels, and this one is particularly well done. Sanders puts readers in the mind of Elmore Leonard and occasionally Wallace Stroby, though it is his own unique voice and flashes of terrific prose that ultimately shine through. Keller is hard to define --- he is probably a little too moral to be doing what he is doing on the side --- but that makes him all the more real. THE STAKES feels as if it is a stand-alone work, and not all of the interesting characters who are introduced in these pages make it to the end. Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing Sanders return several times to Keller’s world in the near future.