October 1, 2022
Deciding to write short and sweet, Barry and Macavity Award finalist Benn flies beyond the horizon of his World War II--set Billy Boyle series in this first collection. The stories range from bloody murder and betrayal during the Revolutionary War to a futuristic collapse of the time-space continuum as two cousins wrangle over an atomic supercollider.
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January 2, 2023
Several of the nine stories in this eclectic if hit-or-miss collection from Benn (the Billy Boyle WWII mysteries) focus on life in prisoner of war camps. Benn is at his best when employing dark humor in otherwise grim situations, as shown in “Vengeance Weapon,” about a Jewish concentration camp prisoner who manages to extract a strange form of revenge on his most hated guard years later when the two are working as colleagues in the U.S. Revenge is also the running idea in “The Horse Chestnut Tree,” one of the volume’s strongest entries, about an enslaved boy who finds a clever way to strike back at a white friend who betrayed him. The gripping“Red Christmas” examines treachery among prisoners in a 1950s-era North Korean prison camp. An enjoyable dystopian tale, “Glass,” lays out what could happen, particularly in the publishing world, if someone found a functioning iPad, loaded with Stephen King novels, 30 years before Apple invented the device. Weaker entries include “Irish Tommy,” a ho-hum police procedural set in 1940s Boston that lacks atmosphere as well as punch, and the plodding “Billy Boyle: The Lost Prologue,” which leaves out Billy. Not just Billy Boyle fans will want to check out this one. Agent: Paula Munier, Talcott Notch Literary.
January 15, 2023
Nine robust stories that present the myriad faces of war and its collateral damage, corporeal and moral. Benn's collection is temporally diverse but thematically unified. The author of the long-running Billy Boyle World War II mystery series, he keeps his resourceful military sleuth in the wings but includes a handful of Billy-adjacent narratives. "Billy Boyle: The Lost Prologue" has a twisty plot involving murder, Norwegian gold, and a German spy. It stands alone as a thriller but also provides a backstory to the 2006 series kickoff. The haunting title story revisits Malou and Lena, two female characters from the Boyle series, prisoners working in a Nazi factory and struggling to survive. "Irish Tommy" depicts a different kind of war on the crime-ridden streets of Boston, with Police Lt. Daniel Boyle, Billy's uncle, at the center of the action. Benn's writing throughout is confident, each story long on period and military detail and fully immersed in its chosen era. Freed from the requirement of a whodunit, character relationships land with more impact. These are full-bodied adventure tales, each creating a fully realized world with three-dimensional people, reminiscent of classic genre stories of a bygone era. Other entries are set during the American Revolution and the final days of the Korean War as well as Benn's bailiwick, World War II. "Glass," an offbeat 1960s crime story with an SF flavor, is an homage to Stephen King. And "The Secret of Hemlock Hill" follows the discoveries of a modern-day Civil War fanatic. Top-notch adventure fiction with a retro feel.
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March 1, 2023
The author of the Billy Boyle WWII mystery series delivers his first collection of short fiction and shows again his ability to capture the psychology of men and women at war. Boyle, a special investigator assigned to General Eisenhower's staff, doesn't appear here, but other characters from the novels do front a couple of stories, including the outstanding title story about female prisoners in a Nazi war camp assigned to assemble secret weapons. Although focusing primarily on wartime tales (Korea as well as WWII), Benn shows his range with a story about an enslaved man during the Civil War and a tantalizing sf tale about a man who finds a curious electronic device that seems to contain entire books, horror novels written by somebody named Stephen Koening. The highlights, however, are the war stories, especially ""The Two Neds,"" about soldiers and the bonds they develop on the battlefield: ""It was second nature to know the other man from the set of his shoulders, the look in his eyes, a catch in his voice. The shorthand of men at war.
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