Death of a Young Lieutenant (Jake Reynolds Mysteries Book 1)

Book summary

In the early 20th century, master art thief Jake Reynolds navigates a world of famous figures while harboring a strange compulsion: to bring murderers to justice whenever he encounters a victim. Despite his criminal tendencies, his sense of justice drives him into dangerous pursuits in DEATH OF A YOUNG LIEUTENANT, a compelling historical mystery.

Excerpt from Death of a Young Lieutenant

A hot summer sun. Interminable heat.

Gray smoke, from raging fires of burning farmsteads, lifting into the air.

He grinned and ran an oil-stained hand through his curly hair. Standing up, straddling the heavy German motorcycle, he half turned and stared at the burning bridge and the wide canal it once spanned. A wide canal cutting through the flat Belgium countryside. A piece of serendipity if he ever saw one.

Perfect.

If he could get across himself.

Blipping the throttle of the cycle nervously he turned again and looked over his right shoulder. A mile away the ghost-like apparition of a company of German cavalry. A Hussars company wearing the incredibly large, furred hat called a colback and dressed in field gray with bright yellow braided loops around their right epaulets, caused him to say a few choice profanities under his breath. The Boche horses were sweating and covered in the light-colored Belgium soil. Signs they had been ridden hard.

The horsemen looked unshaven and equally unkept. He watched, standing and straddling the bike, as the whole company of Hussars materialized out of the darkness of the mass of trees like forest wraiths. A number of them began to look at the ground intently while others scanned the distances in each direction. One of the horsemen stood up in his stirrups and pointed toward his direction. As if moved by one hand the two hundred or so horsemen altered course and began whipping their steeds even more in an effort to reach the captain before he escaped.

A grin spread across his thin lips again just as a lock of curly hair fell across his right eyebrow. A boyish, mischievous grin. A grin which made women want to cuddle and forgive him of his sins. A grin which made even hardened old soldiers—pessimists to the core—nod their heads and grin back. A grin which could make even a serial killer want to become a close bosom friend.

It had always been that way with Jake. That grin. A sudden impish smirk lighting up his face and melting even the coldest of hearts. Because of that grin he could make friends with anyone. Make’em good friends. Life-long friends. Friends that would do anything for him.

He blipped the cycle’s engine a few more times as he turned to look at the burning bridge again. He was in the flat irrigated low country of Belgium. Barely five miles away from the French border. On either side of him was an expanse of rolling farmland burnt brown from the incredibly hot summer’s sun. In front of him was the irrigation canal. Eyeing it, he thought it was maybe twenty feet wide which cut the country neatly in half for more than two miles in either direction. The water was deep and tepid. The perfect obstacle to stop advancing cavalry if one could figure out how to get over to the other side. Almost everywhere one looked, towering columns of black smoke from burning farms and destroyed villages twisted and billowed into the wind as they rose into the sky. They were grim testaments of the approaching Teutonic war machine as it continued to sweep through the Low Countries.

The opening three weeks of the war had not gone as planned for the Allies. At the start both the French and the British collected their armies and went strutting through the countryside singing patriotic songs and acting as if this war was going to be a summer’s vacation and nothing more. With an unbelievable elan and incredible naivete the Allies gaily hurled themselves into the advancing iron fist of the Kaiser’s field armies. The French in particular thought Gallic bravery, and thousands of eager infantrymen, would be more than enough to blunt the thrusting arms of the Boche armies.

They were wrong.

What they ran into was a masterful display of Germanic planning and use of new technology. Army units equipped with copious amounts of machine guns, and backed up by superb usage of artillery, shredded the woefully and inadequately equipped French. In a span of barely three weeks all the front-line units of the French armies suffered incredible losses. Wave after wave of French infantry went gallantly charging across Belgium fields only to be mowed down in droves. French army units, wearing the dark blue tunics and red trousers of an era from out of the era of Napoleon, showed the world how to die in mass numbers. They did nothing to slow the Teutonic determination to capture Paris before summer’s end.

No commander knew in what direction their flanks might lie.

No one knew what lay in front of them. Nor behind them.

No one knew anything other than an overwhelming urge to get back to France and regroup. This pandemic uncertainty was the reason why he was here, hurriedly surveying the countryside and the burning bridge itself, astride the back of a stolen German Army Signal Corp’s motorcycle and wondering whimsically what a Boche prisoner of war camp might be like. His squadron, one of the first to be organized in the newly created Royal Flying Corps, was three miles away on the other side of the canal. His commanding officer asked him to go out on a one-man reconnaissance party. Since there was no contact whatsoever with army headquarters, the squadron was hanging in limbo and dangling by a thin thread over a cauldron of German fury ready to be severed by a Boche’s bayonet.

Only one serviceable aeroplane was left. One out of the fifteen assorted machines the squadron had started out with only three weeks earlier. This last machine, in the colonel's opinion, was far too valuable to send up to look for the enemy. He wanted to send it back to France. To a place where it would be safe. But where? Before he could do anything to save men or material, he first had to know how close the enemy might be. He had to know from what direction or directions they were coming.

So he, Jake Reynolds, agreed to go out and find the Germans. And here he was. In the middle of open country with a company of angry German Hussars riding furiously toward him determined to capture him and send him back to a POW camp. Grinning, he decided he had better things to do than eat cabbage and potatoes behind a barbed wire fence. Using the sleeve of his right arm to wipe the rolling sweat off his dirty face, he took a quick glance at the conflagration consuming the bridge and made a decision. Slapping the cycle’s gearbox into gear, he gunned the engine and kicked up dust as he spun around to his right and raced back down the road and toward the hard-riding cavalry.

The narrow bridge was burning fiercely and making a lot of rolling smoke in the process, but it was burning only in the middle span of the bridge and nowhere else. Both sides of the bridge’s approaches slanted upward toward the middle, giving him, in other words, a perfect ramp to jump the cycle through the flames and over the burning section if he could get the small cycle up to speed in such a short space. The problem was he would have to race back around the curve and approach the on-coming Hussars before turning around and gunning the engine for all its worth back toward the bridge. Quickly assessing other possible options, he saw there were no other viable choices available. It was either succeed in this one attempt or spend the rest of the war as an uninvited guest of the Kaiser.

Sliding around the curve, going in the opposite direction he had just traversed, Jake twisted the cycle’s throttle wide open and bent low over the handlebars as he aimed the front wheel toward the approaching cavalry. Ahead of him the German cavalry saw him coming at them and they began to shout in glee. Their euphoria changed to consternation when they observed the madman on the motorcycle aiming directly at them and accelerating at the same time. Horsemen and cyclist closed in on each other at a furious pace. Cavalrymen sat up in their saddles and started shouting at each other to warn their comrades of this crazy Englishman! Just as it looked as if the cyclist was going to drive right through the middle of the cavalry, the cycle slowed and suddenly its rider was twisting the cycle around and around in the country lane, throwing up a gigantic curtain of dust and almost running over several horses and men in the process.