The Phantom Patrol

In the nineteenth installment of James R. Benn’s acclaimed WWII mystery series, an investigation into a secret gang of Nazi-affiliated art thieves in post-Liberation Paris leads Billy Boyle and his comrades into the catastrophic Battle of the Bulge in winter 1944.

Months after the Liberation of France, ex-Boston cop Billy Boyle has landed in its war-torn capital city, still carrying with him the weight of his last mission. He witnesses a Paris ailing from the carnage it has endured—blocked roadways, buildings marked by bullet holes—but with the nascent hope that the war might be coming to its end. When Billy and his long-time comrade Kaz survive a tense shoot-out in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, they discover a rare piece of artwork left behind in an unmarked grave. Could the artwork be connected to the Syndicat du Renard, a shadowy network of Nazi sympathizers known to be smuggling stolen artwork out of France?

Billy’s investigation takes him through a shadowy underworld of art thieves and the heroic squad of cultural protectors, like the real-life Monuments Men, trying to stop them. Trailing the Syndicat and its unknown leader, the Fox, Billy discovers that someone with a high level of security and communications clearance—someone in the Phantom regiment of the British Army—may be using his position to aid the thefts. Determined to stop the gang of looters, Billy heads up to the frontlines of the war, to a tense, frostbitten calvary, where the Phantom unit’s headquarters is based. There, the Battle of the Bulge—one of the bloodiest campaigns in the history of World War II—unfurls in the Ardennes Forest, on the border of Belgium and Luxembourg. Can Billy and his team survive the bracing onslaught, and return a throng of stolen artwork to its rightful owners?