Evil for Evil by James R. Benn

Evil for Evil is a bit of a twist on the classic war novel set during World War II in Jerusalem and Northern Ireland.

Billy Boyle is a Second Lt. on Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff and followed the war across Africa and Italy with Ike.  He has a distant familial relationship with Ike and calls him, affectionately, Uncle Ike.  His girl friend, Diana, is about to go out on another SOE special op for Britain behind enemy lines and Billy in a fit of frustration decides to take an assignment requested by the British to solve the disappearance of 50 Browning Automatic Rifles in Northern Ireland, which the British think may be linked to German infiltration and an attempt in the making of a German effort to topple the neutrality of the Irish Republic.

This sets Boyle up for a very interesting set of conflicting relationships in Ulster, for Irish-American Catholic Boyle is expected to take orders from the British and their Northern Irish Protestant cronies against possible members of the IRA, an organization Boyle and his family support fervently and with lots of dollars at home in Boston. 

The book is remarkable in how deftly Benn explains the complexities of Irish Catholic and Protestant interaction and politics and weaves it into the personalities, speech and actions of his characters.  In the end it is clear that the good and reasonable on both sides cooperate in the best interests of the whole, and the extremists on both sides tend to be more alike than different.  The extremists are killers with little real motive other than selfish self-interest. The only way to tell apart one their killings is by the MO.

If there had been more Boyles and more of the Protestant persuasion like DI Carrick, perhaps the bloody troubles in Northern Ireland would not have gone on for most of two centuries.

I found myself really being compelled to read on and on in this book with little desire to stop until I found out what would happen to Boyle and to the others who were looking for the guns, the German infiltrators and the extremists on both sides.  I will remember Billy and look forward to following him through the rest of the war in future Benn books.

This is a cracking good war mystery with a little bit of a twist and lots of action and surprises.

Liz Nichols

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst

Furst is master of the historical spy novel.  This one is set in pre-war Warsaw where Jean-Francois Mercier de Boutillon is an attache with the French Embassy and a secret spy master.

The operations that Mercier is asked to carry out are all in an effort by the anti-Petain forces in the French miliary to prove that the Germans plan to move against France by bringing tanks across Belgium.  He watches tank war games in the woods of southern Germany, enlists a German resistance member to get documents that end up supporting the German command's intentions, and helps an old-guard Russian spy couple to defect.  In the mean time, he finds his true love, Anna, an attorney in Warsaw.

The story may be fiction, but the history is accurate.  It is frustrating to see how the French high command was coopted by those who did not want to believe what they could see with their own eyes, or secretly wanted an alliance with Hitler against Russia.  France let the events that led to World War II unfold with little resistance until it was too late.

Furst is an outstanding espionage writer, and I look forward to both his future work and to picking up some of his previous works.

Liz Nichols