Hour of the Cat

A simple New York City homicide, indistinguishable from hundreds of others in 1938: a spinster nurse is killed in her apartment; a suspect is caught and convicted. Fintan Dunne, the P.I. lured into the case and coerced by conscience into unraveling the complex setup that has put an innocent man on death row, will soon find this to be 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 murderous conspiracy of a scope that defies imagination. Grim clouds are roiling over Berlin; plans for a coup are forming among a cadre of Wehrmacht officers in Berlin. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Military Intelligence, is gripped by paralysis over the choice he must make: join the plotters in treason and violate every value he holds as an officer, or betray them to the Gestapo and forsake the country's last hope to avert utter destruction and centuries of shame. With no limits to Hitler's manic pursuit of territorial expansion, with crimes against his people lauded as a program of racial cleansing at the vanguard of the "scientific" eugenics movement launched in America and Britain, the "hour of the cat" looms when every German must make a choice. When Canaris recieves an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, his 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.

Peter Quinn is the author of the novel Banished Children of Eve (winner of an American Book Award) and previously served as speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo. A third-generation New Yorker whose granparents were born in Ireland, he is currently Editorial Director for Time Warner and lives in Hastings, New York.