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| The first four Billy Boyle mysteries are listed below. The author is currently working on the fifth installment, tentatively titled Rag and Bone. Set in London during the winter of 1943/44, amidst the bombs of the renewed Blitz, Billy Boyle becomes embroiled in the ramifications of the Katyn Forest Massacre. Tens of thousands of Polish officers were executed by the Soviets, who in turn blamed the Germans, and the resulting controversy threatened to unravel the Allied alliance.
Billy Boyle is sent to Northern Ireland, at the request of the British government, to investigate links between the Irish Republican Army and the Germans. Automatic weapons have been stolen from a U.S. Army base, and an IRA man has been found dead, shot in the head and left with a pound note in his hand; the mark of the informer. Billy is forced to confront not only danger from German agents, IRA killers and Unionist thugs, but also his own family history, which reaches back generations to the starvation days of the Irish Potato Blight.
Blood Alone finds Billy Boyle ashore in Sicily immediately following the invasion. Awaking in a field hospital with a bandaged head and a case of amnesia, he must struggle to learn his identity while staying one step ahead of the shadowy figures pursuing him. Discovering who he is becomes an odyssey as he wanders the island following what clues he can pick up, on the trail of killers, thieves, and perhaps...himself? Against the historical backdrop of the Allies' secret cooperation with the Mafia, the plot plays out featuring mobsters such as Vito Genovese and Don Calogero Vizzini, head of the Sicilian "honored society".
The pursuit of truth in wartime is never as dangerous as when it forces a choice between the greater good and the life of a loved one. For Lt. Billy Boyle, that choice is as hard as the unforgiving rocky landscape of Algeria where the American Army receives its baptism of fire in the Second World War. A headquarters staff officer serving with General Eisenhower, Billy finds himself in the lead landing craft of the invasion of French Northwest Africa on a wet November morning in 1942. Having wished for a safe desk job, Billy finds that his police background and family connections have instead landed him in the role of Special Investigator charged with looking into low crimes in high places for his “Uncle Ike”. With one mission already under his belt, Billy finds himself in the vanguard of the first invasion of the war and rapidly entangled in French politics as Allied forces attempt to ready themselves for Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps. When corpses begin to appear before the Germans have even appeared, Billy is put on the case to find out if the cause is enemy action, or plain old-fashioned greed. Torn between solving this case and finding the missing Diana Seaton, a British spy held by renegade French fascists, Billy seeks a way to deal with both, hoping that “some Frenchie doesn’t put a bullet in my head before I give the Germans and Italians their chance at it.” The First Wave is a novel about the ultimate choice that war can force on an individual, and how one man struggles to make that choice an honorable one. Billy Boyle tells his story in his unique voice, a reluctant hero slowly coming to grips the moral and physical minefields of the Second World War.
Billy Boyle is the youngest member of the Boyle clan in the Boston Police Department. A tightly knit Irish family, their fierce loyalties extend little beyond each other, Ireland, and the police force where Billy’s father and uncles also serve. The year is 1941, and they have paved the way for Billy’s promotion to Detective through the time-honored traditions of politics and patronage. Then World War II breaks out. The family’s political connections secure Billy a commission and post with a distant relative of Mrs. Boyle’s, a general serving with the War Plans Department in Washington D.C. where Billy is to safely sit out the war. Unfortunately for the Boyles, that unknown general is Dwight David Eisenhower, who whisks Billy off to England when he is appointed Commander of U.S. forces in Europe . This is definitely not what Billy expected, nor is really qualified for. He must rely on his native wits to keep himself alive and avoid humiliating his family as he conducts his first investigation into the death of an official of the Norwegian government in exile. Billy Boyle tells the story of the beginning of Billy’s transformation from a self-centered wise guy interested only in his own survival, to a reluctantly heroic figure. Typically American, Billy never loses his disdain for authority or the cynicism of a city cop as he slowly grows into his role as Ike’s secret investigator. The climatic scene of the story takes place in Nordland, along the rocky coastline and the rugged mountains of this northern-most province in Norway. Nordland, the land of legends, a distant place to which a hero must journey to seek the truth, and which reveals to him his true self, changing him forever. It is here, where according to the Norse legends, ‘by a strand of corpses…heavy streams must be waded through by breakers of pledges and murderers’.
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