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James R. BennPUBLISHED WORKSTHE FIRST WAVE: A BILLY BOYLE WORLD WAR II MYSTERY by James R. Benn Soho Press, September 2007, hardcover, September, 2008, paperback For his second outing, Billy Boyle is in on the 1942 invasion of French North Africa. He's part of an American unit sent to test the Vichy will to fight on the side of the Nazis, and soon finds himself involved with some wartime crooks in Algiers. Drug smuggling was always a strong local industry, and with brand-new and enormously valuable American drugs like penicillin being brought in by the military, it's a potential heyday for the gangsters. Soon Billy finds himself looking at several murders, the capture and humiliation of his English girl friend Diana by Vichy forces and the planned hijacking of a load of priceless drugs. In the end he has to go it alone to bring the gangster kingpin to a crude justice. THE FIRST WAVE has been selected as a Book Sense Notable Book for September 2007 BILLY BOYLE: A WORLD WAR II MYSTERY by James R. Benn Soho Press, September 2006, hardcover, paperback, September 2007 This first of a series about the WWII exploits of Billy Boyle introduces Billy as a Boston Irish police detective who, thinking to land a soft desk job in the war, instead finds himself with Eisenhower’s staff in London as the general's unofficial private investigator. This case involves the murder of a Free Norwegian official at a country manor where the possible invasion of Nazi-held Norway is being planned, and finds Billy in a life-and death struggle with a German spy on which the whole future of the war may depend. BILLY BOYLE has been selected for Bookspan's Military History, American Compass and Mystery Book Clubs. It was named by Kirkus one of the top thirty books for fall 2006, and is also a Book Sense Choice, an Ingram Premier Pick and an IMBA bestseller. THIRD AND FOURTH BOOKS IN BILLY BOYLE WWII MYSTERY SERIES James R. Benn Soho Press, September 2008, September 2009 In the third book of the series, tentatively titled Blood Alone, Billy persuades Mafia capos to aid the Allied war effort in the invasion of Sicily; in the next, he becomes enmeshed in the potentially deadly standoff between the British, the Germans and the IRA in neutral Ireland |
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