Synopsis
"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 landed 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 imagination." Grim clouds are roiling over Berlin, where plans for a coup are secretly forming among a cadre of Wehrmacht officers. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Military Intelligence, is gripped by paralysis over the choice he must make: join the plotters 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 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 eugenics movement launched in the United States and Britain, the "Hour of the Cat" looms when every German conscience must make a choice. When Canaris receives an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, his hour has come.
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.