Bill Runner’s novel, Blaze Returns, starts with a travelling man pulling off the highway in the middle of nowhere at a place called the “Bar’ which only has one customer, and he is drunk.

The man selects an almost concealed table in the corner of the bar and orders a double bourbon straight up and a burger. As his burger is delivered, two men crash through the door. One of them is huge . . . a hired assassin. He walks up to the bartender carrying a shotgun and says, “Where is Mitch?” The bartender tells him that Mitch left hours ago.

The drunk then tries to sneak out the door. The wiry little guy who came in with the big assassin points a pistol at him and tells him to stop. The drunk doesn’t understand the order and continues walking toward the door. The wiry guy shoots him through.

Axel Blaze doesn’t have a gun, but he pulls a knife from his boot. After the wiry guy kills the drunk, he knew that the two thugs were going to kill every witness in the bar. Blaze was a witness. Blaze had been an Army Special Forces Ranger and was a US Marshall, so he was able to put the two men down in such bad condition that the only way that they could leave the bar was in an ambulance—this is a great action scene.

I don’t want to disclose too much of the story. This first chapter was a great start to a very exceptional thriller. Axel Blaze was travelling to Little Butte, Nevada, to find US Marshall Joe Carter who had disappeared two days ago. He was surprised that his encounter two hours from Little Butte was critical to finding his friend. He had only two leads, Mitch and Carter’s man in the witness protection program. The small town of Little Butte was totally controlled by the Dawson family and Blaze was in danger after he first stepped into the Dawson Bar, first by a biker gang and then by a Mexican drug cartel, and finally by the Dawson family.

Blaze Returns is an excellently crafted novel with breathless peril and action in every chapter. I had a hard time putting it down to get a night’s sleep, and I finished it the next day.

My only tiny criticism is that the author had a strange way of putting the word “anyway” into the middle of many sentences (no punctuation). This didn’t make sense to me.