Hour of the Cat Book

It’s just another murder, one of the hundreds of simple homicides in 1939, a spinster nurse is killed in her apartment; a suspect is caught with the murder weapon and convicted. Fintan Dunne, the P.I. lured onto the case; and coerced by conscience into unraveling the complex setup that has put an innocent man on Death Row, will soon find this is a murder with tentacles that stretch far beyond the crime scene…to Nazi Germany, in fact; following it to the end leads him into a murder conspiracy of a scope that defies imagintion.

The same clouds are rolling over Berlin: where plans for a military coup are forming among a cadre of Wehrmacht officers. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Military Intelligence, is gripped by a deadly paralysis: he is neither with the plotters nor against them. Joining them in treason would violate every value he holds as an officer. Betraying the plotters to the Gestapo Chief Reinhard Heydrich might just forsake the country’s last hope to avert utter destruction and centuries of shame. Heydrich is suspicious. With no limits to Hitler’s manic pursuit of territorial expansion, with crimes against the people candy-coated as racial purification, the "hour of the cat" looms when every German conscience must make a choice. When he receives an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, Canaris’s hour has come.

Writing with masterful command of fact and fiction, Peter Quinn transports readers to a pre-War New York and Berlin brimming with atmosphere and consequence. Hour of the Cat is a stunning achievement: tautly suspenseful, hauntingly memorable, and brilliantly authentic.

Publishers Weekly

Quinn (Banished Children of Eve) illuminates New York City on the eve of WWII in his noir second novel. As Hitler's army encroaches on the Sudetenland and his doctors put the "science" of eugenics into practice, New York private dick Fintan Dunne seeks to exonerate Wilfredo Grillo, a Cuban immigrant accused of murdering a neighbor. As in any good boilerplate detective novel, Dunne's search for the killer takes him from the tenements of Hell's Kitchen to a respected sanatorium in the Bronx and unveils a cabal of conspirators. While Dunne fights late-Tammany era corruption, Quinn indicts America's indifference to the impending war in Europe through the characters of an English traveler writer, Ian Anderson, and a young journalist, John Taylor. On the German front, the chief of military intelligence, Admiral Canaris, tries to balance his reluctance for Germany to be at war again and Hitler's mad vision of "destiny." When Canaris learns of an SS agent operating in New York, he tries to surreptitiously alert Anderson, who once interviewed him. Shuttling between the opposing narratives, which eventually connect, Quinn's novel is as much a rebuke of the systematized violence of war as it is straight-up spy thriller: noir purists will blanche at the work's attempted reach, while fans of historical fiction will champion Quinn's method. Agent, Robin Straus Agency. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.