Fintan Dunne

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.

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 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 he receives an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, Canaris's hour has come. Hour of the Cat is a stunning achievement: tautly suspenseful, hauntingly memorable, and brilliantly authentic.

Peter Quinn's The Man Who Never Returned is a noir-ish, stylized detective narrative set in 1950s New York. It follows Fintan, a retired detective turned private investigator who has been given the job of finding Judge Crater, who just went missing in 1930. Based on a real story, it is quite an intriguing tale that was even more so for people living at the time. The famous missing-person case is comparable to the Amelia Earhart missing-person case, though it could have been an even more interesting one. It was alleged that the missing judge may have had information about underhanded dealings in the New York judiciary. It was believed that if such information came to light, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, would have had a hard time becoming the president of the United States. There were also rumors that the judge, who was a known ladies' man, had either decided to disappear or had fallen afoul of the mafia. Featuring hardboiled characters and a beautiful re-creation of New York from the '50s, it is quite a compelling read.

As the Red Army continues its unstoppable march toward Berlin in the winter of 1945, Dunne and his fellow soldier Dick Van Hull volunteer for a dangerous drop behind enemy lines to rescue a team of OSS officers trying to abet the Czech resistance. When the plan goes south, Dunne and Van Hull uncover a secret that will change both of their lives. Years later, Dunne is drawn back into the shadowy realm of Cold War espionage in an effort to clear his friend's good name and right an injustice so shocking that men would, quite literally, kill to keep it quiet. A literary thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end, Dry Bones completes the trilogy started in Hour of the Cat. Peter Quinn has crafted yet another smart and stylish historical mystery, following his longtime hero from the last gasp of the Third Reich to the heady days of the Cuban revolution. Quinn's signature prose--which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt described as "spare but passionate, wry but loving"--shines once again throughout. New York Times bestselling author James Patterson credits Quinn with "perfecting, if not actually creating, a genre you could call the history-mystery." Blending fact and fiction into a thoroughly compelling whole, this is Quinn at his very best.|Peter Quinn is the author of Hour of the Cat, The Man Who Never Returned, Looking for Jimmy, and The Banished Children of Eve.

Dry Bones, the third novel of the Fintan Dunne series by Peter Quinn, follows Fintan, who works for the OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The novel is set during World War II, when Fintan teams up with several of his colleagues working to rescue several intelligence officers who had been fighting the Nazis inside Czechoslovakia. Things go awry and the team soon uncovers a huge conspiracy that may change the course of their careers and their lives. After the end of the war, many of his colleagues have bad things happen to them. The common thing about his friends who either go missing or end up dead is that they were trying to unearth the mystery of an infamous doctor who had gone missing. It seems the CIA is determined to ensure that what happened to the infamous doctor who had made his name experimenting on prisoners of war remained a secret.