Billy Boyle World War II Mysteries

Lieutenant Billy Boyle could have used a rest after his last case, but when his girlfriend, Diana Seaton, a British spy, goes missing in the Vatican, where she was working undercover, he insists on being assigned to a murder investigation there so he can try to help her.

March, 1944. US Army lieutenant Billy Boyle, back in England after a dangerous mission in Italy, is due for a little R&R-and a promotion. But the now-Captain Boyle doesn't get to kick back and enjoy his leisure time because two upsetting cases fall into his lap at once. The first is a personal request from an estranged friend: Sergeant Eugene "Tree" Jackson, who grew up with Billy in Boston, is part of the 617th Tank Destroyers, the battalion poised to make history by being the US Army's first combatant all–African American company. But making history isn't easy, and the 617th faces racism at every turn. One of Tree's men, a gunner named Angry Smith, has been arrested for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit and faces the gallows if the real killer isn't found. Tree knows US top brass won't care about justice in this instance and asks Billy if he'll look into it. But Billy can't use any of his leave to investigate because British intelligence agent Major Cosgrove puts him on a bizarre and delicate case. A British accountant has been murdered in an English village, and he may or may not have had some connection with the US Army-Billy doesn't know because Cosgrove won't tell him. Billy is supposed to go to the village and investigate the murder, but everything seems fishy-he's not allowed to interrogate certain key witnesses, and his friends and helpers keep being whisked away. Billy wonders whether Cosgrove even wants him to solve the murder. The good news is the mysterious murder gives Billy an excuse to spend time in and around the village where Tree and his unit are stationed. If he's lucky, maybe he can get to the bottom of both mysteries and save more than one innocent life.

When an unidentified corpse washes ashore at Slapton Sands on England's southern coast, US Army captain Billy Boyle and his partner, Lieutenant Piotr "Kaz" Kazimierz, are assigned to investigate. The Devonshire beach is the home to Operation Tiger, the top secret rehearsal for the approaching D-day invasion of Normandy, and the area is restricted; no one seems to know where the corpse could have come from. Luckily, Billy and Kaz have a comfortable place to lay their heads at the end of the day: Kaz's old school chum David lives close by and has agreed to host the two men during their investigation. Glad for a distraction from his duties, Billy settles into life at the family's manor, Ashcroft, and makes it his mission to get to know its intriguing cast of characters.Just when Billy and Kaz begin to wrap up their case, they find themselves with not one soggy corpse on their hands but hundreds following a terrible tragedy during the D-day rehearsal. To complicate things, life at Ashcroft has been getting tense: secret agendas, buried histories, and family grudges abound. Then one of the men meets a sudden demise. Was it a heart attack-or something more sinister?

The tenth book in James R. Benn's Billy Boyle WWII mystery series, normally set against a backdrop of WWII Europe, moves us to a flashback in the Pacific. 1943: Amidst the bitter, violent Solomon Islands campaign, Billy is assigned the murder investigation of a native coast watcher, whom future president Jack Kennedy discovered on a nearby island with his head bashed in. As the body count climbs, Billy must figure out whether Jack is a cold-blooded killer, even as war rages around him. A fan-favorite series with built-in readership of historical fiction fans and military history buffs, by one of Soho Crime's bestselling authors. Billy Boyle, the first in this series, continues to sell strongly since its 2013 reissue. Benn consistently does very successful national and local events for his book launches.

Billy Boyle, US Army detective and ex-Boston cop, faces his toughest investigation yet: infiltrating enemy lines in France as the Allies invade Normandy. It's late May 1944. Captain Billy Boyle is court-martialed on spurious charges of black market dealings. Stripped of his officer's rank, reduced to private, and sentenced to three months' hard labor, Boyle is given an opportunity: he can avoid his punishment if he goes behind enemy lines to rescue a high-value Allied soldier. A secret chamber and tunnels, once used by escaping Huguenots in the 17th century, has since been taken over by the Allies. But this "safe house" on the outskirts of Chaumont turns out to be anything but. Two downed airmen, one Canadian and the other American, have been murdered. Billy is flown in as part of a three-man team on June 5, 1944, the night before the Normandy invasion. Billy must solve the mystery of who is behind the murders, then lead a group escape from France back to England, with both the Germans and a killer hot on their heels.

A murder in wartime Switzerland reveals Swiss complicity with the Nazis and profiteering during World War II Billy and Kaz are sent to neutral Switzerland to investigate the murder of a Swiss banking official with ties to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The US and Swiss governments are about to embark on diplomatic discussions regarding the Safehaven Protocols, which are aimed at limiting the amount of war materials exported by Switzerland to the Nazis, halting the laundering of looted gold, and preventing the postwar use of Nazi wealth for war criminals. With the talks about to begin, the OSS wants their involvement in the murder cleared up, as well as to protect the participants from any threat of violence. The plans go wrong from the beginning when Billy and Kaz crash-land in France. As they make their way through occupied territory to the border, they meet Anton Lasho, a member of the Sinti ethnic group, whose family was slaughtered by the Nazis, and who is, in turn, a one-man Nazi-killing machine. They'll need his help, because as they find once they make it across the border, Swiss banks are openly laundering gold 'harvested' from concentration camps, and those that are profiting will do everything they can to protect their wealth and hide their dark secrets.

A double murder in a French chateau just after D-Day threatens Allied operations, and US Army detective Billy Boyle is called to investigate. July, 1944, a full month after D-Day. Billy, Kaz, and Big Mike are assigned to investigate a double murder, close to the front lines in Normandy. An American officer and a member of the French Resistance were found dead in a manor house outside the town of Trevieres. The investigation is shrouded in secrecy, due to the highly confidential nature of the American unit headquartered at the Manoir de Castilly; the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. This vague name covered a 1,000-man unit with a unique mission within the US Army: to impersonate other US Army units in order to deceive the enemy, causing them to think they were facing large formations, when in reality it was the 23rd (they called themselves The Ghost Army) creating deceptions by radio traffic, dummy inflatable vehicles, and sound effects. Not even the units adjacent to their positions were to know what they were doing. The balance of power in WWII hangs in the balance-can Billy solve the crime before the Ghost Army is exposed?

In the 14th Billy Boyle mystery, US Army detective Billy Boyle and Lieutenant Kazimierz travel into the heart of Nazi-occupied Paris on a dangerous mission: ensure a traitor to the French Resistance unwittingly carries out a high-stakes deception campaign. August, 1944: US Army detective Billy Boyle is assigned to track down a French traitor, code-named Atlantik, who is delivering classified Allied plans to German leaders in occupied Paris. The Resistance is also hot on his trail and out for blood, after Atlantik's previous betrayals led to the death of many of their members. But the plans Atlantik carries were leaked on purpose, a ruse devised to obscure the Allied army's real intentions to bypass Paris in a race to the German border. Now Billy and Kaz are assigned to the Resistance with orders to not let them capture the traitor: the deception campaign is too important. Playing a delicate game, the chase must be close enough to spur the traitor on and visible enough to ensure the Germans trust Atlantik. The outcome of the war may well depend on it.

Billy Boyle is sent to the heart of the USSR to solve a double-murder at a critical turning point in the war in this latest installment of critically acclaimed James R. Benn's WWII mystery series. It's September 1944, and the US is poised to launch Operation Frantic, a shuttle bombing mission to be conducted by American aircraft based in Great Britain, southern Italy, and three Soviet airfields in the Ukraine. Tensions are already high between the American and Russian allies when two intelligence agents-one Soviet, one American-are found dead at Poltava, one of the Ukrainian bases. Billy is brought in to investigate, and this time he's paired, at the insistence of the Soviets, with a KGB agent who has his own political and personal agenda. In the course of an investigation that quickly sprawls out of control, Billy is aided by the Night Witches, a daring regiment of young Soviet women that flew outdated biplanes at night at very low altitudes, bombing hundreds of German installations. It's a turning point in the war, and allied efforts hang by a thread. Unless Billy and his KGB partner can solve the murders in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, Operation Frantic is doomed.

In southern France in 1944, Captain Billy Boyle works with French Resistance fighters to protect a Royal Navy Commander, uncovering a wide web of subterfuge and betrayal in the process. Southern France, 1944: What should be a simple assignment with a Special Operations Executive officer gets complicated quickly as Billy navigates the tensions between Resistance groups in the process of gathering information on Vichy officials and other collaborators who escaped with the retreating Germans. Unexpectedly, the SOE officer has many enemies in the Resistance, linked to the failed Vercors uprising. Diana Seaton, Billy's wartime lover, crosses paths with him as she and legendary SOE agent Christine Granville embark on a humanitarian mission on behalf of those killed while helping the SOE. The search for a witness to a deadly explosion leads Billy to the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit made up of Nisei soldiers that became the most highly decorated unit in the history of the US Army. With sacrifice and betrayal afoot, Billy doesn't know who he can trust, or how close to death this case may bring him.

In the eighteenth installment in this fan-favorite WWII mystery series, US Army Captain Billy Boyle investigates a murder in a charming English village, where personal vendettas tangle with wartime espionage. Norfolk, England, November 1944: After a series of dangerous missions in the South of France, US Army Captain Billy Boyle is finally on leave, and is settling into a peaceful rest at the country estate of Sir Richard Seaton, the father of Billy's British lover, Diana. Seaton Manor is a comfortable haven, and Billy is eager to spend a few precious days in Diana's company pretending the war is far away. Unfortunately, Billy's leave is cut short when a crashed German bomber resurfaces off the coast with the corpse of a British officer in the pilot seat. The nearby village of Slewford hosts a top-secret military intelligence operation, home to high-ranking German POWs, and so the crash is a matter of national security. Billy is assigned by the commander of the POW facility to investigate. After the plane is discovered, a local villager is murdered-and suddenly what had appeared to be a failed enemy military operation takes on an even more sinister aspect. All Billy's ex-Boston cop instincts are put to the test as he interviews the grieving, angry, and conniving citizens of this idyllic English country village in search of the truth.

An investigation into a gang of Nazi-affiliated art thieves leads Billy Boyle and his comrades directly into the line of fire at the catastrophic Battle of the Bulge. Winter 1944: Months after the Liberation of France, ex-Boston cop Billy Boyle finds himself in a Paris reeling from the carnage it has endured but hopeful that an end to war is in sight. When Billy finds a rare piece of artwork after a tense shoot-out in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, he thinks it could be connected to the Syndicatdu Renard, a shadowy network of Nazi sympathizers known to be smuggling stolen artwork out of France. Trailing the Syndicat, Billy discovers that someone with a high level of communications clearance, someone in the Phantom regiment of the British Army, may be using his position to aid the thieves. Billy, determined to stop the abettor, heads up to the frontlines where he experiences a last-ditch battle against overwhelming odds. There, the ruinous Battle of the Bulge unfurls in the Ardennes Forest. Can Billy and his team survive the bracing onslaught and return the stolen artwork to its rightful protectors?