Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

Overview

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 that this is a murder with tentacles which 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. 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 Canaris receives an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, his hour has come. Hour of the Cat is a stunning achievement: tautly suspenseful, hauntingly memorable, and brilliantly authentic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823297955
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Series:	The Fintan Dunne Trilogy
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,072,317
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Quinn is a novelist, political historian, and foremost chronicler of New York City. He is the author of Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America and a trilogy of historical detective novels.

Editorial Reviews

The pacing is tight, the descriptions of New York in the 1930s rich, the characters engaging, and the dialogue pitch perfect. Only a churl could resist.

Boston Globe

Hour of the Cat is the hour of Peter Quinn's genius. It's been said a million times but I'll say it again: I couldn't put it down.

Frank McCourt

Noir to the core... Smart and evocative.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

A chilling history lesson wrapped in a murder mystery... It is the best kind of historical novel, driven by memorable characters, a suspenseful plot, and real-life questions.

USA Today

Extremely readable... A Gotham version of Philip Marlowe.

The Chicago Tribune

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.

Publishers Weekly

Ties forged in the trenches of WWI link a New York private eye with the future head of the CIA, in a well-done 1939-set thriller from Quinn, whose 1994 Banished Children of Eve covered the same city in the Civil War. Fintan Dunne was an up-and-coming homicide detective until his honesty became a problem for the corruption-riddled department. Concentrating on divorce work, he makes do in the late Depression with a cheap office and public transportation until pretty Cuban Elba Corado shows up with a case that puts him back in the murder investigation business. Elba's much older half-brother Walter Grillo has been charged with the grisly slaying of a nurse. While Dunne tries to avoid taking on a case that would throw him into competition with his former colleagues on the force, real-life Admiral Wilhelm Canaris in Berlin, chief of German military intelligence, tries to avoid enlistment in the cause against the Fuhrer he detests. And on Wall Street, Medal of Honor winner William Donovan, who served in the 69th Regiment with Dunne, does uneasy business with creepily ambitious prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. The three plotlines begin slowly to merge as Dunne takes up the case of Grillo, who's on the short list for execution. The slain nurse worked for a suave doctor whose bodyguard is a thug with ties to the U.S. Nazi movement and its overlords in Berlin. And the doctor, who has his own creepy sanitarium in the Bronx, turns out to be involved in the eugenics movement. The investigation puts Dunne in agreeable contact with a savvy prostitute who buys her dresses at Elba's shop, but it also brings him into painful contact with the worst of his erstwhile colleagues, the creeps who framed Grillo andwho now force Dunne to get help from Donovan. Everything comes to a head in the freak hurricane of 1938. Good thriller. Historic figures seldom ring true in fiction, but Quinn pulls it off.

Kirkus Reviews

On the eve of WWII, PI Fintan Dunne investigates the wrongful imprisonment of a man convicted of killing a nurse. As he investigates, Dunne crosses paths with a deadly German spy. Ned Schmidtke reads this thriller with the uninflected delivery of a 1950s’ hard-boiled detective. As the writing is flat, in the mode of film noir, the narrative style works pretty well. Schmidtke's pacing, though, could use some fine-tuning; he tends to pause when the text doesn't lend itself to a break. And his American male characters sound rather alike. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

FEB/MAR 06 - AudioFile