" Benn follows up his first World War II mystery ("Billy Boyle") with another danger-filled episode and delivers a cross-genre tale that is at once spy story, soldier story, and hard-Boyled detective."--"Library Journal" (starred review)
"The period details are spot-on and Billy . . . continues to make a thoroughly engaging detective."--"The Denver Post"
"Part Indiana Jones derring-do and part grown-up adventure novel with spies, black marketers, loyal and dastardly French, and the reliably evil Nazis. If you like World War II historical crime novels, you'll love this one."--"Mystery Scene"
""The First Wave" is first rate."--"I Love a Mystery" newsletter
"A 'rattling good' read."--Rhys Bowen
"A solid follow up to Benn's first novel. . . . I] look forward to his next."--Robert B. Parker
"What a great read, full of action, humor and heart. . . . Equal parts spy thriller, war story and murder mystery, with a dollop of romance that's never sweet, this is just a terrific book. More please "--Louise Penny
"Certain to appeal to WWII fiction fans."--"Booklist"
Billy's task is to help arrange the surrender of the Vichy French forces in Algeria. But dissension among the regular army, the militia, and DeGaulle's Free French allows blackmarketeers in league with the enemy to divert medical supplies to the Casbah, leading to multiple murders. Billy must find the killers while trying to rescue the girl he loves--a British spy.

What's a twenty-two-year-old Irish American cop who's never been out of Massachusetts before doing at Beardsley Hall, an English country house, having lunch with King Haakon of Norway? Billy Boyle himself wonders. Back home in Southie, he'd barely made detective when war was declared. Unwilling to fight--and perhaps die--for England, he was relieved when his mother wangled a job for him on the staff of a general married to her distant cousin. But the general turns out to be Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose headquarters are in London, which is undergoing the Blitz. And Uncle Ike wants Billy to be his personal investigator.
Billy is dispatched to the seat of the Norwegian government in exile. Operation Jupiter, the impending invasion of Norway, is being planned, but it is feared that there is a German spy amongst the Norwegians.
Billy doubts his own abilities, with good reason. A theft and two murders test his investigative powers, but Billy proves to be a better detective than he or anyone else expected.

An American soldier’s life, from the Depression to WWII and the turbulent 1960s, is told through memory—and a dangerous secret. Secrets trail an American soldier from his Depression upbringing to the cold winter battles in the Ardennes Forest in the last months of World War II, and through the postwar decades, as he struggles to keep his family from being torn apart while keeping the truth buried close to his heart. Clay Brock, proprietor of Jake’s Tavern, has endured terrible losses throughout his life. In 1964, he is working to build a life for his wife and son, only to see everything he has worked for threatened by forces beyond his control. To keep his family from breaking apart, he must confront the very secret he has kept buried. For Clay, the war has never been over, and his foxhole buddy Jake Burnett never far from his thoughts. At two crucial points in his life, as a young father and later as an old man at the dawn of a new and unfamiliar century, his memories draw him back until he must confront them and speak the truth. But at what cost?

Danger reigns supreme as Nazi Germany braces for a final showdown in this WWII thriller from the author of the Billy Boyle mysteries.   On Desperate Ground is the story of men and women caught up in the death throes of Nazi Germany, struggling to maintain those things precious to them—life, an end to killing, and even sanity itself. Colonel Johann Faust has lost everyone he ever loved and feels he is going inexorably insane. He hears the haunting voice of his dead fiancée and the demons that roar through his mind as he perfects a plan to save Nazi Germany from defeat and insure a greater and deadlier new world war. Captain Dieter Neukirk, once a protégé of Faust’s, is more concerned with saving the lives of his remaining men than sacrificing them in a fanatical last stand. Meanwhile, Elsa Klein, Dieter’s lover and the chief social worker at a Berlin hospital, is engaged in her own dangerous work, providing medical care and identity papers to hidden Jews in the city. American Captain Mack Mackenzie, pulled from a military hospital before his wounds are healed, is assigned to investigate reports of a secret Nazi operation. Wanting only to make it home alive, Mack finds himself in a life and death struggle with unlikely allies and a ferociously determined opponent. Americans and Germans alike are drawn to a hilltop in the remote German countryside, where they find themselves between powerful armies and forced into a terrible decision that could end one war or begin a new one.