James R. Benn Livres

Set in 1950, the story follows Private Ethan Shard, who is entangled in the black market while stationed in Japan. His life takes a drastic turn when North Korea invades South Korea, leading to his deployment alongside his partner, Elliot "Skitter" Skinner. Captured during their first battle, Shard must navigate the harsh realities of captivity, facing both external threats and internal struggles. This gripping tale explores themes of survival, betrayal, and the resilience of the human spirit amidst war.

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.

Just days after the Liberation of Paris, US Army Detective Billy Boyle and Lieutenant Kazimierz are brought to Saint Albans Convalescent Hospital in the English countryside. Kaz has been diagnosed with a heart condition, and Billy is dealing with emotional exhaustion and his recent methamphetamine abuse. Meanwhile, Billy’s love, Diana Seaton, has been taken to Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women, and Kaz’s sister, Angelika, who he recently learned was alive and working with the Polish Underground, has also been captured and transported to the same camp.This news is brought by British Major Cosgrove, who asks Billy for help, unofficially, in solving what he thinks was the murder of a British agent recuperating at Saint Albans. The convalescent hospital is really a secret installation for those in the world of clandestine warfare to recover from wounds, physical and emotional. Some are allowed to leave; others are deemed security risks and are detained there. When a second body is found, it is evident that a killer is at work in this high-security enclave. Now Billy must carry out his covert investigation while maintaining his tenuous recovery, shielding his actions from suspicious hospital authorities, and dodging the unknown murderer.

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.

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.

US Army detective Billy Boyle is called to investigate a mysterious murder in a Normandy farmhouse that threatens Allied operations. July, 1944, a full month after D-Day. Billy, Kaz, and Big Mike are assigned to investigate a murder close to the front lines in Normandy. An American officer has been found dead in a manor house serving as an advance headquarters outside the town of Trévières. Major Jerome was far from his own unit, arrived unexpectedly, and was murdered in the dark of night. The investigation is shrouded in secrecy, due to the highly confidential nature of the American unit headquartered nearby in the Norman hedgerow country: the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, aka, the Ghost Army. This vague name covers a thousand-man unit with a unique mission within the US Army: to impersonate other US Army units by creating deceptions using radio traffic, dummy inflatable vehicles, and sound effects, causing the enemy to think they are facing large formations. Not even the units adjacent to their positions know what they are doing. But there are German spies and informants everywhere, and Billy must tread carefully, unmasking the murder while safeguarding the secret of the Ghost Army—a secret which, if discovered, could turn the tide of war decisively against the Allies.

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 spirals out of control, Billy is aided by the Night Witches, a daring regiment of young Soviet women flying 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.

What’s a twenty-two-year-old Irish American cop who’s never been out of Massachusetts 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.

These dazzling stories show a crime fiction veteran at the height of his career. In his first-ever collection, the award-winning author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries presents an eclectic mix of new and previously published mystery stories rife with historical detail and riveting wartime storytelling. “The Horse Chestnut Tree” explores betrayal and murder during the American Revolution. In the speculative work “Glass,” an atomic supercollider and the breakdown of the time-space continuum change the lives of two cousins devoured by greed. “Vengeance Weapon,” a historical thriller about an enslaved Jewish laborer working at the Dora concentration camp, looks at how far someone will go to get revenge. And for his Billy Boyle fans, Benn delivers “Irish Tommy,” a police procedural set in 1944 Boston featuring Billy’s father and uncle. Full of terror, action, amusement, and bliss, The Refusal Camp is a must-have collection from a crime fiction veteran at the height of his career.

Powieść sensacyjno-kryminalna rozgrywająca się w Londynie podczas II wojny światowej. Zostaje zamordowany radziecki dyplomata, wsp�łwinny mordu katyńskiego. O dokonanie zab�jstwa podejrzewany jest Polak, kt�rego niewinności dowodzi jednak zdolny detektyw.