Code Blood by Kurt Kamm, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Kurt Kamm introduces Colt Lewis, a young paramedic with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, in Code Blood, a stand-alone thriller but one that could serve as the first in a series to feature this character.

Colt had been expected to follow his father's footsteps and be a rancher in Wyoming. Instead, he dreamed of serving as a member of a firefighting unit. When his father died, he sold the family ranch and moved to Los Angeles, where he spent two years training as a paramedic, eventually being hired at Station 88 in Malibu. His first emergency is a gruesome one: a pickup truck has hit a light pole, a young woman lying nearby with her leg severed above the ankle. Colt treats her injuries and comforts her as best he can, but she dies on the way to the hospital. But not without leaving a mystery behind; her severed foot is missing.

The foot was picked up by a man named Marcus, an albino who fancies himself a vampire. In the confusion following the accident, he picked up the foot and left the scene. But this treasured prize only feeds another desire of his: to taste the blood of a young woman he knows slightly — he thinks of her as "China Doll" — but whose blood group he is very familiar with, one of the rarest of all, one known as Bombay. People possessing this blood group can only receive transfusions from others who have it, thus making it a valuable commodity, one that Marcus is determined to leverage to his advantage.

The storyline in Code Blood is quite suspenseful, the lives of these three people — Colt, Marcus, and "China Doll" — intersecting in unpredictable ways. But each also has a point of view, often within a concurrent time frame, and it can be tricky at times to follow along as the narrative jumps from one character to another. Still, this is a very moving mystery, written by an author whose passion is clearly influenced by the men and women who serve their communities as firefighters and paramedics.

Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of Code Blood.

Red Flag Warning
Aberdeen Bay (Trade Paperback), May 2010
ISBN-13: 9781608300297; ISBN-10: 1608300293

Hazardous Material
MCM Publishing (Trade Paperback), May 2013
ISBN-13: 9780988888203; ISBN-10: 0988888203