Book Review: Blame the Dead by Ed Ruggero

By Kaylie Seed

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Ed Ruggero’s novel Blame the Dead was published in March of this year and is absolutely explosive and exceptionally well done. Blame the Dead is first and foremost a historical fiction novel based in Italy during the thick of WWII but there’s a twist. Blame the Dead is not just a wonderfully written piece of historical fiction, it is also a murder mystery that ends up revealing even more secrets that lie behind the lines of fire.

Ruggero’s main character is Eddie Harkins, an Irish-American Lieutenant who is part of the Military Police. His job day-to-day is to break-up traffic jams or to guard Prisoners of War (POWs). Back in Philadelphia, before volunteering to go off to war, Eddie was a run-of-the-mill traffic cop with little experience with homicide investigations. One fateful morning Eddie and his driver are stopped by some privates and called over to what looks like a murder scene. Dr. Myers Stephenson was shot in the back of the head during an air raid, the perfect time to try and get away with murder as no one would hear a thing. Together with the help of Nurse Kathleen Donnelly and his driver Dominic Colianno, Harkins must now try to solve what feels like an unsolvable case on hospital grounds while battle rages on. While Harkins pieces together what happened to the Doctor, other secrets float to the surface showing that the humble hospital grounds are not as innocent as they seem. There are a lot of different characters that play various important roles throughout Blame the Dead and Ruggero does an excellent job not letting any slip through the cracks for the reader. While sometimes an abundance of characters can seem daunting, Ruggero frequently has the narrator slip in a reminder of who that person is without having to completely describe them again.  

War is by no means a sanitary place to be. Soldiers are covered in mud, dirt, and other people’s bodily fluids all while trying to defend the front and trying not to die. Ruggero’s details on the ruggedness and messiness of war are spectacular and constantly remind the reader that this was not a time where you could go take a shower if you wanted to; being clean was a luxury that many on the front lines could not afford. Ruggero takes his time to really show the reader what it may have been like in a hospital during World War II. Ruggero also brings up the topic of Venereal Diseases that were rampant among soldiers during WWII and points out how common this was - even if it’s something not discussed in every day history books. Ruggero has woven fiction with actual historical facts in such a seamless way that the reader may believe that this was actually part of history and not historical fiction. It’s the attention to detail that Ruggero has put into Blame that Dead that truly make it a remarkable novel. Blame the Dead manages to take a murder mystery and twist it with the grittiness of war to create a very believable story. 

Readers who enjoyed The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris would enjoy reading Blame the Dead by Ed Ruggero.

Thank you to Goodreads and Forge Publishing for the gifted ARC.