Set against the heroism and heartbreak of WW II, former Army officer Ed Ruggero's Comes the War captures the stories of ordinary people swept up in extraordinary times.
One of several recent historical mysteries that focus on the era of the Second World War ... initially comes on like gangbusters, with a promising cold open ... All the pieces are there for author Ed Ruggero to put them together, but he doesn’t quite achieve that ... The difficulty with the just-the-facts approach results in a book that is overly talky and not in any way evocative. Comes the War covers the themes of 1944 London — privation, rationing, dread of the unknowns regarding the coming invasion of Fortress Europe — without ever giving the reader a sense of the time and place ... a perfectly adequate and satisfying police procedural, and if you’re not asking for much more than that, you won’t be disappointed. But there is so much promise in this particular historical setting, and so many opportunities for the stolid American cop to run into characters who are interesting, or at least eccentric. All of the elements are there; they are just not delivered in the right way.
The last time we saw Lieutenant Eddie Harkins, he was a U.S. Army MP in Sicily, thrust into the unfamiliar role of solving a murder. Now it’s April 1944, and Harkins, reassigned to the OSS, is in London, where murder comes calling again. ... Meanwhile, in a somewhat unnecessary subplot, Harkins finds himself in the middle of the bungled Operation Tiger, a D-Day preparation exercise covered more fully in James R. Benn’s The Rest Is Silence . That aside, this is a solid series entry, awash in rich detail about the machinations leading up to the Normandy landings.
Ruggero recreates the period’s feel, months before the Normandy invasion, while playing fair with the reader. His superior storytelling makes comparisons to James Benn appropriate.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
