The Man Who Never Returned »

Peter Quinn has worked as a speech writer for two New York governors, and as the Editorial Director for Time Warner. He is a third generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland.

Judge Joe Crater's disappearance in 1930 spawned countless conspiracy theories and captured the imagination of a nation caught in the grip of The Depression.

Fifteen years later, Fintan Dunne the detective encountered in Quinn's novel Hour of the Cat, recently retired and bored, answers a summons to New York where he is asked to solve the old case for a newspaper magnate only interested in making a profit from the story.

Peter Quinn once again has written a compelling blend of history and fiction that is simply unputdownable.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Quinn works his jaded dicks and dames with scores to settle quite intimately into that weave, where they sparkle and gleam. Their tics and hangups tell us what we need to know not only of their characters, but of their times as well. Explaining the tough Dunne's aversion to airliners, Quinn writes, "Planes always brought back the war, the rush, the anxiety, the need to get everywhere in a hurry. The thrill of looking down on the world from several thousand feet wore off quickly." There may only be a hip flask's worth of psychology in that observation, but it's served neat.

Quinn's jaded cops quote Ecclesiastes and Poe, Dante and Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas's aesthetic of clarity is especially salubrious in Dunne's line of work and true to the hardboiled genre, it arrives almost too late. But in the end it's not Aquinas but an older saint, Ambrose, who holds the key to the Crater mystery and that's as close to a spoiler as this review will come. The presence of such ancient shades in The Man Who Never Returned seems fanciful, but they're a reminder that the diversions and demons Quinn's characters pursue are ancient ones, not limited to one era or generation. In the end, the mystery is unraveled but history claims its prerogative, swallowing up the answers. Joseph Force Crater his name like the open hole in which Fintan Dunne and his generation first saw death remains missing to this day.