A BOOK REVIEW

I’ve been meaning to do some reviews of books I’ve read that I like well enough to recommend. So here we go with the first one.

I read this one thanks to our community member Judith, who recommended James R. Benn’s “Billy Boyle” series of World War II mysteries. She was right; if you liked “Foyle’s War” when it was on PBS, I’m pretty sure you’ll like this series (now up to book 18).

The books are written sequentially and later books will reference earlier events; that’s the best way to read them. However, I wanted to see as a writer if the series lived up to the hype, so I got the most recent one, “From The Shadows” (the newest one comes out this September 5), since it’s my experience with mystery series that reading a later one is a good way to see if the author is running out of steam and coasting on the reputation of the earlier books. That is definitely not happening here.

I don’t like giving away the story when it comes to things like mysteries - especially if I am recommending it to you, the readers - so here is the plot blurb from the inner jacket cover:

“Southern France, 1944: What should be a simple assignment with a Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer gets complicated 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 has many enemies in the Resistance, related to the failed Vercors uprising. Billy crosses paths with legendary SOE agent Christine Granville, and the search for a witness to a deadly explosion leads him to the legendary 442nd Combat Team. With sacrifice and betrayal afoot, Billy doesn’t know who he can trust, or how close to death this case may bring him.”

Since I am a World War II historian, and just recently have been doing research on the Mediterranean Theater, I was particularly interested to see if the real history is solid. It is. That is absolutely crucial to doing historical fiction successfully - the real history has to be solid so that what I call “the rubber history” can pass the smell test. (You all saw that at work in the “Trinity” screenplay)

The history is excellent, and gets into things that are not widely-known, such as the Resistance war on Crete, the Levant Schooner Flotilla that transported special ops agents around the Mediterranean, and the Vercors Uprising Massacre. The details on the 442nd RCT- the unit of Japanese-Americans that became the most highly-decorated unit in US Army history - are spot on, down to Sergeant Daniel Inouye surviving a sniper’s bullet because he had two silver dollars in his tunic chest pocket, which took the blow from the bullet. See what I mean? If you weren’t familiar with Senator Inouye’s biography, you wouldn’t know that, but it really happened.

The characters are good. You have the cynical-idealist detective, Captain Billy Boyle, a Boston PD detective working for the Office of Special Investigations at SHAEF HQ (he is distantly related through family to Mamie Dowd Eisenhower, and some people think he’s “Ike’s nephew” and thus underestimate him). “Watson” to Danny’s “Holmes” is British Army Lieutenant Piotr Augustus “Kaz” Kazimierz, formerly of the Polish Army and in civilian life a Baron, a man of taste and intelligence, who is equally capable of deadly action when necessary.

The interplay of these characters with actual historical figures is the heart of the tales, and the research shows in the way those real people are characterized.

Overall: Read. In. Confidence. It was easy to “see the movie” while reading this.

The books are quick reads, well-written page turners - I read this one over the weekend. I’ve gone on to order Books 1, 2, and 3 this week. I’m going to have to be careful with them; it would be incredibly easy to procrastinate the work on the current “next book” by taking off to read these. Only when the day’s work is done!

I was impressed enough to write an email to the author. We’ve now established “diplomatic relations” and he was really happy to discover “Clean Sweep,” since my book goes into detail on a wartime issue that he is working on in his “next one.” So, you can see he does indeed do Solid Research.

You can get these books at Amazon:

Billy Boyle World War II mysteries

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