DRY BONES

Quinn's final installment in a spy trilogy that began with Hour of the Cat (2005) and The Man Who Never Returned (2010) sends New York PI Fintan Dunne on a secret wartime mission to Slovakia to rescue OSS officers from the last gasps of Nazi aggression.

Dunne and his deceptively tough partner, the poetry-spouting banker's son Dick Van Hull, barely escape Slovakia, where nothing is as it was described. A slippery chain of events exposes them to Dr. Karsten Heinz, a war criminal whose grave offenses include supervising gruesome experiments on concentration camp victims. Not only does Heinz avoid conviction, he appears to be among the many Nazi scientists and technicians being imported by the U.S. government to aid in the fight against communism. That men who were employed by Hitler to help kill millions would be awarded new careers in America is, says an outraged OSS officer, "the greatest danger we face...becoming the enemy we oppose." Jump to 1958. Working for a high-profile Manhattan security firm (complete with a smart and beautiful office assistant), Dunne comes across coded instructions to meet an OSS crony who has crucial information about Heinz's whereabouts. More old friends and foes emerge from the shadows, while Van Hull, now a drunken shadow of his old self, remains hidden with a secret of his own. Quinn writes with elegant restraint; he's a master of tone and a deft orchestrator of people and events. His portrayal of Wild Bill Donovan, controversial head of the OSS, is but one of his sure-handed transformations of reality to fiction.

Gripping up to the end, the book—which takes its title from the old spiritual about everything being connected—will send readers who were new to Quinn back to his other books in the series.