Ben Sanders Books in Order

If you want the Auckland police trilogy: The Fallen → By Any Means → Only the Dead
If you want the Marshall Grade books: American Blood → Marshall's Law → Sometimes at Night
If you want a crooked-cop caper: The Stakes
If you want a California standalone: The Devils You Know

Ben Sanders was born in Auckland in 1989 and grew up on the North Shore. Long before he had a book deal, he was already building stories in his head on the walk to and from school, then hurrying home to write them down. That early habit, part daydreaming and part discipline, stayed with him.

Crime fiction got him young.

Around eleven or twelve, he read The Day of the Jackal and realized books could move with the tension and velocity of a thriller. That opened the door to writers like Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Peter Dexter, and James Ellroy, and by his mid-teens he had decided he wanted to write novels of his own. He wrote unpublished crime books while still in school, which meant he arrived at adulthood not just wanting to be a writer, but already practicing like one.

He did not take the obvious arts-school route. Knowing a writing career was never guaranteed, Sanders chose engineering as his back-up plan and studied at the University of Auckland, graduating in 2012 with a Bachelor of Engineering with First Class Honours. The funny part is that his back-up years were also his breakout years. While still at university, he wrote The Fallen, By Any Means, and Only the Dead, three Auckland-set crime novels that all became New Zealand fiction bestsellers.

Those early books introduced Detective Sergeant Sean Devereaux and his rough-edged ally John Hale. They are police thrillers, but they are also books about city life under pressure, where murder cases keep opening into something dirtier, and where corruption inside institutions can be as dangerous as the criminals outside them. Readers who click with Sanders usually mention the pace first. Then the clipped dialogue, the bruised characters, and the feeling that every decision is one bad step away from a much worse night.

After that, Sanders widened the map. American Blood moved him to the United States and introduced Marshall Grade, a former NYPD undercover cop living under witness protection in New Mexico. He followed it with Marshall's Law and later Sometimes at Night, keeping the hard-boiled feel but shifting into a more American register of motels, mobsters, old cop loyalties, and men who are never as safely hidden as they think. American Blood was also optioned for film.

He can also work well outside a continuing series.

In The Stakes, he wrote a stand-alone about an NYPD detective who robs rich criminals, and in The Devils You Know he built a California thriller around a former covert operative who wants out of violence and gets pulled straight back in. Across all these books, a few interests keep showing up: bent cops, damaged professionals, criminal systems that reach farther than expected, and cities that feel fully lived in. Even when the plots get big, Sanders tends to keep the prose lean and the emotions tight, which gives the stories their snap.

He still lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and continues to write crime fiction. The path has stayed surprisingly consistent: a kid making up stories on the walk home, an engineering student publishing thrillers, and then an author who kept following that instinct.