Billy Boyle, a young Irish-American cop from Boston has just made detective - with a little help from his cop relatives and friends - when World War II breaks out. His rabidly anti-English family calls on his mother's distant cousin, Mamie, married to a general, to wangle a staff job for him far from the fighting. But instead of a "safe, cushy" stateside assignment, he is ordered to London, still undergoing the Blitz. His "Uncle Ike" is Dwight D. Eisenhower, plucked from obscurity to command Army forces in Europe, and he wants Billy to be his personal investigator. Billy, who had never left Boston before he enlisted and was sent to Officer Candidate School, is not sure how good a detective he really is. But when Eisenhower asks Billy to undertake this task, he dutifully sets off for Beardsley Hall, where the Norwegian government in exile, led by King Haakon, is in residence. Accompanied by an aristocratic Polish officer in exile and a beautiful British WREN, his mission is to catch a spy who may have been planted there. A theft and two murders test Billy's investigative powers, as he comes to grips with the deadly demands of a war he never wanted any part of. To his own surprise - and that of others - Billy proves to be a better detective than any one expected.

Lieutenant Billy Boyle reluctantly accompanies Major Samuel Harding, his boss, in the first boat to land on the shores of Algeria during the Allied invasion. Their task is to arrange the surrender of the Vichy French forces. But there is dissension between the regular army, the local militia, and De Gaulle’s Free French. American black marketeers in league with the enemy divert medical supplies to the Casbah, leading to multiple murders that Billy must solve while trying to rescue the girl he loves, a captured British spy.

Billy Boyle awakens in a field hospital in Sicily with amnesia. In his pocket is a yellow silk handkerchief embroidered with the initial L. Gradually he remembers: he has been sent ashore in advance of the troops with this token from Lucky Luciano to contact the head of the Sicilian Mafia. But he must also thwart a murderous band of counterfeiters of Army scrip led by Vito Genovese.

Fifty Browning Automatic Rifles have been stolen from a US Army base in Northern Ireland. His “uncle” Ike Eisenhower sends Billy to recover the weapons, which might be used in a German-sponsored IRA uprising. Bodies begin to accumulate as Billy finds unexpected challenges to his Boston-Irish upbringing and IRA sympathies. There are rogues on both sides, he learns.

American Lieutenant Billy Boyle is assigned to London by his uncle, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to investigate the murder of a Russian security officer in the buildup to D-Day. Billy recognizes that this is a politically charged case, pitting Allies against one another, and that he must proceed with caution. The Polish contingent is incensed over evidence that implicates the Russians in the murder of hundreds of Polish prisoners in the so-called Katyn Forest Massacre, and Scotland Yard thinks this murder of a Soviet officer may be a revenge killing—perhaps perpetrated by Billy’s friend Kaz, a Polish baron in exile. But Billy doesn’t buy it. Can he find the real murderer, exonerate his friend, and prevent Allied relations from falling to pieces at this critical moment of the war?

In his time investigating crimes for both the Boston cops and General Ike's European forces, Lieutenant Billy Boyle hasn't encountered a serial killer. But now it looks like he may—a serial killer with a particularly frightening agenda. Two officers from the American troops stationed in Caserta, Italy, not far from Naples, have been found murdered. Lieutenant Norman Landry was found behind a supply tent with his neck snapped. Captain Max Galante, MD, was strangled on the same night, and his body left in a garden outside HQ. The MOs are completely different, and it seems like the officers had no connection to each other, but one frightening fact links the murders: each body was discovered with a single playing card: the Lieutenant, the ten of hearts; the Captain, the jack of hearts. The message seems to be clear—if the murderer isn't apprehended, the higher ranks will be next. Billy is sent to Italy for the investigation, which grows increasingly sinister. But he has other things on his mind, too. His girlfriend, Diana, is on a very dangerous spy mission, and Billy doesn't know when—or if—he'll see her again. To make matters worse, Billy's just learned that his baby brother, Danny, is being sent over to Europe as an infantry replacement, an incredibly dangerous assignment. And all around him, he sees GIs suffering from combat fatigue preparing for another battle. As the invasion at Anzio begins, Billy needs to keep a cool head amidst fear and terror as the killer calculates his next moves.

In this seventh installment of James R. Benn’s hit WWII-era mystery series, Lieutenant Billy Boyle goes undercover in the Vatican. 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. An American monsignor is found murdered at the foot of Death's Door, one of the five entrances to Saint Peter's Basilica. Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, wants the killing investigated. The fact that the Vatican is neutral territory in German-occupied Rome is only one of the obstacles Billy must overcome. First is a harrowing journey, smuggled into Rome while avoiding the Gestapo and Allied bombs. Then he must navigate Vatican politics and personalities—some are pro-Allied, others pro-Nazi, and the rest steadfastly neutral—to learn the truth about the murdered monsignor. But that's not his only concern; just a short walk from the Vatican border is the infamous Regina Coeli prison, where Diana is being held. Can he dare a rescue, or will a failed attempt alert the Germans to his mission and risk an open violation of Vatican neutrality?

March, 1944: US Army Lieutenant Billy Boyle, back in England after a dangerous mission in Italy, is due for a little R&R, and also 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 all-African American battalion poised to make history by being the US Army's first combatant African American company. But making history isn't easy, and the 617 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 vacation time 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 into 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 is confused about whether Cosgrove even wants him to solve the murder, and why. 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 David's family's fancy 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?

1943: In the midst of the brutal, hard-fought Solomon Islands campaign between the Allies and the Japanese forces, Lieutenant Billy Boyle receives an odd assignment: he's sent by the powerful Kennedy family to investigate a murder in which PT skipper (and future president) Jack Kennedy has been implicated. The victim is a native coastwatcher, an allied intelligence operative, whom Kennedy discovered on the island of Tulagi with his head bashed in. That's Kennedy's story, anyhow. Kennedy was recovering in the Navy hospital on the island after the sinking of his PT-109 motor torpedo boat. The military hasn't decided yet whether to make him a hero for surviving the attack, or have him court-martialed for losing the boat, and the last thing the Kennedy clan wants is a murder charge hanging over his head. Billy knows firsthand that he shouldn't trust Jack: the man is a charmer, a womanizer, and, when it suits his needs, a liar. But would he kill someone in cold blood? And if so, why? The first murder is followed by two more, and to find the killer, Billy must sort through a tangled, shifting web of motives and identities, even as combat rages all around him.

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. The chief witness against him is Archie Chapman, the London gangster last seen in Rag and Bone, and Boyle is convicted. Stripped of his officer's rank, reduced to private, and sentenced to three month's hard labor, Boyle is given an opportunity: he can avoid his punishment if he accepts a dangerous mission.In the town of Chaumont, a "petite chateau" on the outskirts of town serves as a safe house for the Allies. The chateau has a secret chamber and tunnel, first used to hide escaping Huguenots in the 17th century. But someone is killing the people who have passed through the safe house. Two officers, one a British escaped POW and the other an American pilot, have been murdered. Billy is parachuted 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 Trévières.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?

The fourteenth Billy Boyle WWII mystery takes place in northern France during August of 1944. Captain Billy Boyle is assigned to track down a French traitor, Bernard Fouch, a member of the French Resistance recently discovered to have been an informer. Fouch betrayed many members of his Resistance group who were subsequently tortured by the Gestapo and then killed or sent to concentration camps. Fouch now has information about an Allied campaign to recapture Paris from the Nazis and he is on the run to tell the Germans. The Resistance is out for blood, and they are hot on Fouch's trail. What they don't know is the plan was leaked on purpose, a ruse devised by a colonel 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 Fouch: the deception campaign is too important. Playing a delicate game, the chase must be close enough to spur Fouch on and visible enough to insure the Germans trust Fouch's intentions

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.

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, Billy Boyle collaborates with Resistance fighters to defend a Royal Navy Commander, uncovering a wide web of subterfuge and betrayal in the process. In the fall of 1944, Billy Boyle, Kaz, and Big Mike, returning from the Soviet Union, are called to southern France for what should be a simple assignment: they are to serve as security for Royal Navy Commander Gordon Stewart, head of the Special Operations Executive’s Section F in Algiers, which oversees SOE agents sent into the southern region of occupied France. Stewart’s mission is to work with Resistance leaders to gather information that will help track down Vichy officials and other traitors who escaped with the retreating Germans. Death threats have been made against Stewart, and there has already been one attempt in Algiers. Over the course of his investigation, Billy learns that Stewart has made many enemies as of late: both on the SOE side and the Resistance side, due to a financial plot gone wrong. Diana, Billy’s on-again, off-again sweetheart, joins the search for the truth as well, as does the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit made up of entirely Nisei soldiers which went on to become the most highly-decorated unit in the history of the Army. With as much sacrifice as betrayal afoot, Billy isn't sure whom he can trust. Can he and Kaz keep Stewart safe . . . and not die in the process?

At the height of WWII, Billy Boyle, US Army Captain and detective, finds himself investigating the dark side of a charming English village when a military accident reveals a premeditated murder 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 his British lover, Diana Seaton. 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, that illusion doesn't hold for long: the village hosts a top-secret military intelligence operation, home to high-ranking German POWs. When a crashed German bomber resurfaces off the coast with the corpse of a British officer in the pilot seat, 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 the nineteenth installment of James R. Benn’s acclaimed WWII mystery series, an investigation into a secret gang of Nazi-affiliated art thieves in post-Liberation Paris leads Billy Boyle and his comrades into the catastrophic Battle of the Bulge in winter 1944. Months after the Liberation of France, ex-Boston cop Billy Boyle has landed in its war-torn capital city, still carrying with him the weight of his last mission. He witnesses a Paris ailing from the carnage it has endured—blocked roadways, buildings marked by bullet holes—but with the nascent hope that the war might be coming to its end. When Billy and his long-time comrade Kaz survive a tense shoot-out in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, they discover a rare piece of artwork left behind in an unmarked grave. Could the artwork be connected to the Syndicat du Renard, a shadowy network of Nazi sympathizers known to be smuggling stolen artwork out of France? Billy’s investigation takes him through a shadowy underworld of art thieves and the heroic squad of cultural protectors, like the real-life Monuments Men, trying to stop them. Trailing the Syndicat and its unknown leader, the Fox, Billy discovers that someone with a high level of security and communications clearance—someone in the Phantom regiment of the British Army—may be using his position to aid the thefts. Determined to stop the gang of looters, Billy heads up to the frontlines of the war, to a tense, frostbitten calvary, where the Phantom unit’s headquarters is based. There, the Battle of the Bulge—one of the bloodiest campaigns in the history of World War II—unfurls in the Ardennes Forest, on the border of Belgium and Luxembourg. Can Billy and his team survive the bracing onslaught, and return a throng of stolen artwork to its rightful owners?

In the final days of 1944, Billy Boyle investigates a curiously unprompted murder at an English airbase that operates cutting-edge and highly secret radio espionage work. After his last mission put him in the tailspin of the Battle of the Bulge, Captain Billy Boyle travels to southeast England to visit his girlfriend, Diana Seaton, for a brief holiday respite. Diana is engaged in classified work at RAF Hawkinge, including Operation Corona, which recruits German-speaking Women’s Auxiliary Air Force members—many of them Jewish refugees from the Kindertransport rescue mission—to countermand German orders and direct night fighters away from Allied combat bombers. It’s fascinating and critical espionage work, but it’s laced with peril, as Billy is soon to find out. On a scenic walk along the White Cliffs of Dover on Christmas Day, Billy and Diana stumble upon the dead body of a US Air Force officer, who has papers with highly sensitive, and strictly confidential, information on them. Information worth killing over. As Billy digs into the secret world of codebreakers and radio jammers stationed at RAF Hawkinge, another body turns up. Now Billy must find out what connects these two men—and who was so hell-bent on silencing them. Enlisting the help of his long-time military comrades, Billy undertakes another thrilling investigation that brings him to a war-torn Yugoslavia, where Billy must rescue an escaped POW who may be the only person who knows the truth.