Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery

“This book has got it all—an instant classic.”—Lee Child, author of The Hard Way

 

“It is a pleasure marching off to war with the spirited Billy Boyle. He is a charmer, richly imagined and vividly rendered, and he tells a finely suspenseful yarn.”—Dan Fesperman, author of The Prisoner of Guantanamo

 

What’s a twenty-two-year-old Irish American cop who’s never been out of Massa-chusetts before doing at Beardsley Hall, an English country house, having lunch with King Haakon of Norway? Billy Boyle himself wonders. Back home in Southie, he’d barely made detective when war was declared. Unwilling to fight—and perhaps die—for England, he was relieved when his mother wangled a job for him on the staff of a general married to her distant cousin. But the general turns out to be Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose headquarters are in London, which is undergoing the Blitz. And Uncle Ike wants Billy to be his personal investigator.

 

Billy is dispatched to the seat of the Norwegian government in exile. Operation Jupiter, the impending invasion of Norway, is being planned, but it is feared that there is a German spy amongst the Norwegians.

 

Billy doubts his own abilities, with good reason. A theft and two murders test his investigative powers, but Billy proves to be a better detective than he or anyone else expected.

"A promising premise — placing a callow Boston police officer in the midst of WWII intrigue — isn't fully realized in this first of a new historical series from Benn (Desperate Ground). Soon after Pearl Harbor, Billy Boyle escapes a combat tour because his Southie family pulls strings to place him on the staff of a distant relative by marriage, a general named Dwight Eisenhower, whom Billy calls 'Uncle Ike.' Billy's untried detective skills are soon put to the test in London, where he's assigned to unmask a spy who may compromise Allied plans to drive the Nazis out of Norway. When one of the chief suspects turns up dead, an apparent suicide, Billy displays a knack for forensics as he uncovers medical anomalies that suggest homicide. Hopefully, Uncle Ike will have more to do in future installments — and Benn will introduce the sort of character complexity that distinguishes, say, Charles Todd's WWI-era psychological whodunits (A Long Shadow, etc.) or PBS TV's Foyle's War, which also involves murder investigations during WWII. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A 22-year-old Irish American cop thinks he's avoiding military service by becoming a general's staff member, but the general turns out to be Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dispatched as an "investigator," Billy searches for a German spy amongst the exiled Norwegian government.

James R. Benn is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, with a Masters in Library Science and Instructional Technology from Southern Connecticut State University. He worked in the library field for twenty-five years and is now Coordinator of Information Technology for West Hartford Public Schools. A previous novel, Desperate Ground (QuietStorm, 2004), also dealt with WWII.