Description de l’éditeur
US Army Captain Billy Boyle plunges into partisan warfare alongside betrayed French Resistance fighters in his seventeenth WWII investigation.
Southern France, 1944: Ex-Boston cop and wartime military investigator Billy Boyle is given a dangerous assignment—to extract a British Special Operations Executive officer from Crete and take him to France to serve on a security detail to identify fascist sympathizers. The mission gets even more complicated when Billy realizes how many enemies the officer he must protect has accrued. In the aftermath of the failed, and costly, Vercors uprising, tensions among Resistance groups are running high, and the mission turns far deadlier than expected.
On the quest to weed out Vichy collaborators, Billy takes up an independent investigation to exonerate an innocent comrade of murder. In the process, he crosses paths with the legendary SOE agent Christine Granville and the heroic 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up of Nisei soldiers who are already on their way to becoming the most decorated unit in the history of the US Army.
With sacrifice and subterfuge afoot, Billy doesn’t know who he can trust, or how close to death this case may bring him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Benn's thrilling 17th WWII mystery featuring U.S. Army investigator Billy Boyle (after 2021's Road of Bones), Billy is dispatched to German-occupied Crete in October 1944 to locate Capt. Richard "Dickie" Thorne, who's been helping the Greek partisans there but has been out of radio contact. The head of a Special Operations Executive team in Algiers wants Dickie to serve as his security officer for his trip to southern France to meet Resistance groups, collect information on turncoats who betrayed their comrades to the enemy, and assist the French government in identifying those who escaped with retreating Germans. But blood feuds, subterfuge, and long-held vendettas shadow the SOE mission, beginning with the death of Billy's guide in Crete. Subsequent murder attempts directed at SOE operatives put Boyle and his friends, including his lover, Lady Diana Seaton, who's engaged in a humanitarian mission, in the firing line as they race to thwart an assassination. This richly detailed wartime adventure spotlights acts of barbarity and heroism, bungled leadership, and valiant last charges. Benn reliably entertains.
