WHEN HELL STRUCK TWELVE

A World War II supersleuth slips into Paris to find a murderous French traitor.

August, 1944. Though Gen. Patton’s troops are driving the Nazis out of France, Germany is responding with desperate violence. In the thick of combat in northern France, Capt. Billy Boyle (Solemn Graves, 2018, etc.) wants to get back to Paris, still occupied by the Nazis. News of the recent Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has his sidekick, Lt. Piotr “Kaz” Kazimierz, worried sick about his family back in Poland. The pair learn of a Resistance leader known only by the code name “Atlantik” who’s been betraying his French comrades to the Germans. Deducing his identity and finding him falls to Boyle, who narrates in a forceful first-person. The murder of Lt. Sean McKuras, an American who worked closely with the Resistance, gives the search even more urgency and pathos for the American duo. After the area surrounding the murder scene is secured, suspicion falls on Lucien Fassier, known as the Falcon, who’s disappeared. Scenes of battle alternate with episodes in the hunt and cameo appearances by real wartime personages like Ernest Hemingway and Gen. Eisenhower, whom Boyle calls Uncle Ike because of his years of working in the general’s office. At length the trail takes them to Paris, where their pursuit hits a pothole with the murder of Fassier. If he’s not the traitor, then who is?

As usual, Benn packs this installment with historical detail and writes with authority and punch.