"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.