Solemn Graves (A Billy Boyle WWII Mystery, Band 13) - Hardcover

Buch 13 von 21: Billy Boyle World War II Mystery

Benn, James R.

 
9781616958497: Solemn Graves (A Billy Boyle WWII Mystery, Band 13)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1616958499 ISBN 13: 9781616958497
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle, was named one of five top mysteries of 2006 by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee. A Blind Goddess was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Rest Is Silence was a Barry Award nominee. Benn, a former librarian, splits his time between the Gulf Coast of Florida and Connecticut with his wife, Deborah Mandel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
 
The first dead body I saw in Normandy was a cow, tangled in the branches of a shattered tree at a crossroads by the edge of a field, a good thirty feet off the ground. More of them lay scattered across the pasture, the thick green grass dotted with gaping holes of black, smoking earth.
      A few cows were still upright. One wandered into the ditch alongside the road, trailing intestines and bellowing, her big brown eyes crazed with fear and pain.
      “Stop,” Sergeant Allan Fair said from the front seat, placing a hand on the driver’s arm. “Easy like.” The driver, a skinny kid who looked like he might shave soon, if he lived that long, let the jeep roll to a halt. Fair got out, planted his feet, raised his M-1 to his shoulder, and squeezed off a round that found a home between those two brown eyes. The cow collapsed into the ditch, and silence filled the air.
      “Damn,” Fair said to no one in particular, and got back in the jeep. The driver eased into first gear and took off slowly, carefully navigating around a shell hole on one side of the hard-packed dirt road. We passed a sign at the crossroads, tilted lazily to one side and peppered with shrapnel.
      Dust means death.
      As we drove on, the roadside was decorated with the burned-out hulks of vehicles whose drivers had not heeded the warning. The bovine casualties had likely been the result of a nervous driver who barreled down the road, kicking up a dust storm and making it through before the German shells rained down on the intersection.
      “I didn’t think we were close to the front yet,” I said from the back seat, as we proceeded at a dust-free twenty miles an hour under the hot morning sun. “I mean, for Kraut artillery spotters.”
      “It’s close enough. They’re up in those hills,” Fair said, sweeping a hand toward the distant rise to the south. “With a good pair of binoculars, they can pick out a swirl of dust five, ten miles away. Plus, they left spotters behind, hiding out in barns or in the woods.”
      “Scuttlebutt is, they pay the French for any dope they bring them about targets,” the driver said.
      “Hard to imagine any Frenchman would sell information to the Germans,” Big Mike said.
      “How long you been in Normandy?” Fair asked.
      “We got here yesterday,” Big Mike said.
      “Figures,” was all Fair said.
      “We seen pictures,” Big Mike said. “People throwing flowers at GIs, stuff like that.”
      “Anyone throw flowers at you, kid?” Fair asked the driver.
      “A Kraut threw his helmet at me when his rifle jammed,” he said. “But no flowers.”
      “See? So don’t believe everything you read in Stars and Stripes,” Fair said. He spat into the road, ending the conversation.
      Big Mike looked at me, eyebrows raised. Or looked down at me, I should say. Big Mike—Staff Sergeant Mike Miecznikowski—was tall and broad and took up most of the cramped back seat.
      “I was looking forward to the flowers, Billy,” he said. “In Sicily, all they threw were stones.”
      The jeep moved slowly, past open fields and into more hedgerows. Here, the roadway became a narrow, sunken lane with a deep ditch on either side. For centuries, farmers had been mounding earth to mark the boundaries of their fields and to keep livestock in. Topping it all off was a tangle of trees and bushes, their roots intertwined with the gritty gravel, dirt, and stone base.
      Hedgerows made every pasture a fortress, every lane a death trap.
      “How long have you been here, Sergeant Fair?” I asked. Fair had been ordered to take Big Mike and me from First Army headquarters to the outskirts of Bricqueville, where a dead body was waiting for us. Not the sort that ended up in a tree or torn apart by explosives, but the kind that found itself wearing a slit throat in the sitting room of a French villa, safe behind the lines, and wearing the uniform of a US Army captain. Simply said, it was murder, an almost quaint and old-fashioned custom these days. Killed In Action was the usual phrase, and here in hedgerow country—the French call it the bocage—there was a lot of it going around.
      “I been on the line since D+3,” Fair said, his voice a low mutter as he turned to study me. He did his best to look unimpressed. My ODs were clean, and from the SHAEF patch on my shoulder, I was obviously nothing but a headquarters feather merchant out for a joyride. Fair was headed back to the front, where he’d been since three days after D-Day. His olive drabs were worn and muddy, bleached by the summer sun to a shade not found in any Quartermaster’s stores. The bags under his eyes were as dark as midnight sin, and crow’s-feet arced from the corner of his eye, an occupational hazard from squinting over the sights of an M1.
      His mouth was a thin slit of insolence. His eyes were narrowed, wary, and suspicious. He didn’t bother saying “sir,” but I didn’t care about that. At the front, there was an unspoken rank, and it wasn’t based on an officer’s bars or a non-com’s stripes. It had to do with how long a man faced death and kept going despite it. All Fair knew was that Big Mike and I still had the smell of London about us, and that made us nothing but nuisance cargo in his book.
      I didn’t blame him one damn bit.
      “Anything else, Captain?” Fair said, his eyes scanning the road as it curved ahead. Which was obviously of greater interest to him than any stupid questions a desk jockey from Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force had. Probably why he was still alive.
     He clamped a hand on the driver’s arm, signaling him to roll to a dustless halt.
      “Look, he’s making a run for it,” Fair said, pointing to a flurry of road dust off to our right, where the land sloped away.
      “Who?” Big Mike asked.
      “The jerk who got all those cows killed,” the driver said.
      “They’re dead meat,” Fair said, leaning back and shaking a Lucky Strike loose from a crumpled pack. He lit one, ignoring the sound of distant booms and the screaming crescendo of shells coming in from the German lines. “The Krauts got a crossroads over there zeroed in.”
      Explosions crumped a mile or so away, just ahead of the dust cloud, belching smoke and fire as they ripped through trees and shrubs.
      Then it was over. Fair drew in his smoke as if it were oxygen, cupping the cigarette even in broad daylight.
      “Shouldn’t we see if they need help?” I asked.
      “Naw,”...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1616958499
ISBN 13 
9781616958497
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
360
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland

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9781641290661: Solemn Graves: A Billy Boyle World War II Mystery (A Billy Boyle WWII Mystery, Band 13)

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ISBN 10:  1641290668 ISBN 13:  9781641290661
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2019
Softcover