Officer of the Court: A Novel of WWII

It's 1943, and Major Harry Voss, an Army lawyer, is glad to be home after a harrowing tour of duty in England. He knows that his stateside duty, in the middle of the war, is a bribe to keep him from talking about his last assignment (recounted in The Advocate). But when the body of one of his teammates, a dogged but disagreeable man named Armando Grassi, turns up in Scotland's Orkney Islands, Harry is approached by Woody Kneece, a captain in Washington's Criminal Investigation Corps. Kneece, an ex-cop, is determined to learn how Grassi--who was assigned to a duty station in Greenland--ended up dead on the Scottish estate of a pro-Hitler English industrialist. Kneece artfully dodges official efforts to short-circuit his investigation. The son of a Southern millionaire, he might have sat out the war at a desk job in Washington, but he's dying for a chance to prove he's his own man, and uncovering the veil of silence drawn over Grassi's murder may give him that opportunity. His motivation is more clearly drawn than Harry's, but by the time they uncover the truth, Harry's own moral values have led him to care just as deeply as the CID captain about the death of a man he couldn't abide when he was alive.

The main characters in this gritty, engrossing mystery are multidimensional, good company on the arduous journey across the Atlantic during wartime and to the front lines in Italy, where Woody and Harry go to confront a critical witness to Grassi's death. The period is vividly evoked, and the politics of England before D day, when wealth and patriotism made strange bedfellows, are particularly well-rendered. Military suspense fans who met Voss in Bill Mesce's previous novel will be particularly pleased with this standalone sequel. --Jane Adams