Al Dawson
Borderlines by Al Dawson
Jace Kelly is a federal prosecutor whose career has been built on a single conviction: that the law is the only thing standing between order and chaos on the southern border. When the son of a cartel chieftain is arrested in a major drug bust, the cartel responds by taking Kelly’s sister and daughter hostage.
The choice Kelly faces is the kind his entire professional life has prepared him to avoid. His oath as a federal officer, or his family. His trust in the government that employs him, or his own judgment about what has to be done.
Alongside Kelly is Epictetus Ryan, known as Epic, an Apache tracker and Special Forces sniper whose knowledge of the borderlands is the one resource Kelly can trust without reservation.
Set in New Mexico and the deserts of northern Mexico, Borderlines is a political and moral thriller about what happens when the systems built to protect people are unwilling, or unable, to protect the people who built them.
Published by Luna del Lobo Books, January 2026.
Read the essay behind the novel.
- Trapped between cartels, shadowy terrorists and a government that wants him out, Jace will face choices to save his family and his own life in a war where lines between right and wrong, good and evil, legal and illegal will be increasingly blurred.
- When a huge shipment of cocaine is captured by US agencies on the southern border, it is only the beginning of a train of events where cartel empires, terrorists and Washington politics will collide, and Jace and his family are in the line of fire.
- Blood, betrayal and terror will meet on the scorching deserts of northern Mexico where Jace must find a way to rescue his family and save his own life.
- With disgrace, or imprisonment, or even death in the bargain, what will be in store for Jace Kelly?
292
Pages
Kindle
Edition
2805
Sales
our author
Al Dawson is a retired regulatory lawyer who spent his career inside the institutions his fiction examines: the Church, the courtroom, the regulatory apparatus. He understands how they work. And how they fail the people who trusted them.
His novels are built from that knowledge. Searching for Noriko (2021) earned second place at the Palm Beach Book Festival. Priest (2024) won Gold, First Place for Adult Fiction at the 2025 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Borderlines (2026) continues the moral universe he has been building since his first novel.
He lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida with his wife Jane. He publishes under Luna del Lobo Books.
Borderlines is the third novel in Al Dawson’s catalog. Begin with Searching for Noriko, or read Priest first.
ODYSSEY
A reckoning with the limits of institutional loyalty, played out across the deserts of New Mexico and the borderlands of northern Mexico, where Jace Kelly must decide who he is when the law cannot help him.
EXPLORATION
Into the political and criminal architecture of the southern border, and into the question every Al Dawson protagonist eventually faces: what do you do when the system you serve turns against the people you love.
THE CRAFT
A political thriller that refuses to simplify its moral questions, from a former regulatory lawyer whose career gave him an insider's understanding of how governments make decisions about people.