The Billy Boyle series has become like binge-watching your favorite show! I've been up until two or three am each night and I grab the next one as soon as I finish. Unfortunately I'm almost at the end of all the ones published so far. Road of Bones takes Billy, Kaz, and Big Max to Russia.

As one of the small number of licensed female glider pilots in Canada, the Night Witches have always been of special interest to me. Benn includes them in this episode when Billy flies with one of them. The Night Witches were one of three all-female Russian air force units during WWII. They flew bi-places to their German targets, cut their motors and noiselessly glided to their target before dropping their bombs. They terrorized the Germans who called them Night Witches because the only sound you heard was the wind over the canvas wings - something like the quiet brushing of a broom.

There isn't as much graphic detail of the huge human devastation caused by war in this book, compared to When Hell Struck Twelve but the cost of war is made clear when one character explains he was sent work on the road of bones... a road built by forced labor to access gold mines in the far north-east of Russia where winter temperatures were -50 F and the land was too frozen to dig graves when workers died so the were buried into the road as it was built. ( )

Big Mike and Billy hitch a ride with Allied bombers to get into the heart of Russia, where they are to investigate the murder of both an American and Russian soldier. Big Mike's plane goes down closer to the front and all Billy can think about is how to get back there to look for him and his fellow fliers. The base mystery, the locked room case is good and Billy is aided by an old nemesis, which was interesting. Kaz arrives a bit later in the story and Billy uses his Boyle charm to try to get to the front to look for Big Mike's plane, catching a ride with the Night Witches. Another great WWII historical mystery. ( )

Billy and BigMike are put on a B17, shuttle bombing between England and Russia, to investigate the murder of two officers at the Russian end of the shuttle. His early experiences with the NKVD are neither pleasant nor promising. His next shuttle ride is with one of the "Night Witches" and includes bombing a German fuel dump as on-board entertainment.
His witnesses continue to disappear; one to become a trampler whose job is to walk through minefields and set off the mines. A chase across Iran creates an apt but bloody finale. ( )