There are a couple of mysteries which this novel seems to solve. Primarily, of course, Billy Boyle, a Boston detective on the staff of “Uncle” Ike (Dwight D. Eisenhower, that is) during World War II, is sent to occupied Rome to find the murderer of an American Monsignor at the Vatican. However,...
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 f...
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...
If Brennan was a suspect in the eyes of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, I shouldn’t waste a minute before I talked to him. I could always find Thornton later, but if an Ulster cop was interested in a guy named Brennan, then I figured I had better get to him first. I drove t...
It was Alice Withers, the kitchen maid, with my uniform from yesterday, or most of it. She had bright eyes, full lips, straw-blonde hair, and looked to be twenty or even younger. A cheery girl.“Sorry to wake you, Captain,” she said, “but the baron said you should be up, and I thought you’d want t...
I’d been standing at a window, or maybe it was a door to a veranda overlooking sparkling blue water. Sunlight glinted off low, rolling waves as soft breezes wafted through palm fronds in the garden below. It was beautiful, except for the twin-engine German bomber, smoke and fire trailing one wing...
I passed the barns, outbuildings, and Quonset huts, and parked on the gravel drive in front of the main house. It was a solid three-story affair with elegant columns, seated on top of a hill with a commanding view of the countryside. In the distance I saw a platoon double-timing it along a road. ...
Apparently he’d done a very thorough interrogation, and had ended up with a date for Saturday night. He wanted to show her London in style, and quizzed me on the best restaurants. I told him to talk to Kaz about that. As he drove off in the direction of the Rubens Hotel, I gazed at the Thames, th...
Frosted breath obscured his view as he tried to slow his breathing, reduce the visible plume of warmth and direct it downward into the small depression he’d made in the snow. He’d had to crawl about ten yards out from the treeline to see over a hump in the ground, down into the small village nest...
I struck gold on the verandah of Sexton’s place, where the two of them were eating off tin plates. Rice, fish, and breadfruit, which is kind of like a potato. White and starchy, anyway. Hugh went inside to fix me a plate and returned with three cans of beer, kept moderately cool in his ancient re...
Now it was a fair-sized pile of rubble, with the few intact buildings housing the 3rd Division staff. In front of a burned-out church, a water pipe stuck up from the ground, a spray of water gushing into the air. Women and children with buckets were lined up, eager to haul the fresh water home. A...
Harding was holding out on me, Hatch was tossing me in the clink, and Archie Chapman was on my side. My world was upside down. Two MPs who weren’t clued in to the sting strong-armed me into the barbed-wire enclosure at the edge of camp. Guards opened up the double gates an...