The Rest Is Silence: A Billy Boyle World War II Mystery

by James R. Benn

Paperback, 2014

Status

Available

Call number

813.6

Publication

New York: Soho Press, Inc., 2014

Description

Fiction. Literature. Mystery. Historical Fiction. HTML:The fog of war surrounding D-Day and Operation Tiger provides cover for one of Billy Boyle's grisliest investigations. 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? From the Hardcover edition..… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member ethel55
Billy and his pal Kaz return in a ninth adventure by James. R. Benn. It's 1944, and the two are sent a bit north in England to investigate a body that has come ashore near where some top secret maneuvers are going on for the Allies. Ashcroft, the home of Kaz's old Oxford school friend, David
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Martindale, becomes their quarters for the duration of the investigation, bringing its' own mysteries to their attention. Once again, I was intrigued by the process the Allies undertook in practicing for invasions and saddened by the reality Benn expands on in the afterword. The author doesn't shy away from how difficult war can be and as WWII is drawing closer to its' end, we start to see much more of the psychological effects it has on some characters. This was another fantastic World War II mystery featuring Billy Boyle and his pal Kaz, a Polish Baron.

"They do not comprehend where they are going," Kaz said, whispering his words to the wind.
I knew he didn't mean a particular place. There were no map coordinates to mark the location. He meant that point in time and space where bullet meets bone, where grown men cry rivers of tears; the point you can never return from, even if you live to be ninety.
p. 20
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LibraryThing member jamespurcell
Benn keeps mining the mother lode of WW2 for historical gems, faux or otherwise, that he polishes into a neat mystery for Billy and Kaz to solve. Bigot, Slapton Sands, friendly fire and a body on the beach are the grist for his mill this time. Billy and Kaz survive quite a gamut of naval shells, P
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47 rockets a booby trap and two varieties of machine gun bullets.. But they do prevail with a little help from a local author and Billy's two muses; his father and Sherlock H. For a WW2 buff, they are a nice froth on the sea of history.
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Awards

Barry Award (Nominee — Novel — 2015)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2014-09-02

Physical description

325 p.

ISBN

9781616955700
Page: 0.2345 seconds