The Ninth Circle

By: James R. Benn

In the latest installment of this fan-favorite WWII mystery series, US Army Captain Billy Boyle is dispatched to Cuba, where he makes unlikely alliances to defeat a common enemy.

January, 1945: If Billy Boyle thinks a summons to Havana will give him a chance to sip a cold Hatuey under the Caribbean sun, the tropical fantasy is dead on arrival. Within hours of landing, Billy and his partner-in-crime-solving, Lieutenant Piotr Kazimierz, are assigned to investigate the murder of a Navy intelligence officer. But as the men wait for an informant at a beachside bar, a bomb goes off, and they narrowly escape with their lives. Then the informant—a Cuban taxi driver named Hector Díaz—is found dead outside his apartment. What did Hector know? And who was so desperate to silence him?

Thrust into a double-murder investigation, Billy and Kaz team up with the brass at the British Legation in Havana, including none other than Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, to gather intel from sources inside Havana’s criminal underworld. Their search takes them from Havana’s Chinatown to the Gran Casino Nacional, where notorious gangster Meyer Lansky offers his services if it means defeating the suspected common enemy—the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence wing of the Nazi military—and finding out what sort of intelligence they are so hell-bent on keeping top-secret at this late stage in the war.