Timothy Carney was raised in an orphanage in the Midwest.  He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served thirteen months in Vietnam.  Upon discharge, he joined the Orange County sheriff's Department.  He worked in various capacities for the Orange County sheriff’s Department as an investigator, including narcotics and homicide. After serving as a homicide investigator and a sergeant, he was promoted to lieutenant.  Timothy Carney is a graduate of Regis University, Denver, Colorado.

Timothy Carney co-authored Final Affair, a truce crime book.  According to the book description, “When Janet Overton died from "unexplained causes," no one in her Orange County community suspected foul play. But a year later, Sheriff's Investigator Tim Carney sensed something amiss in this so-called "nothing case"-and uncovered the shocking truth about Dr. Richard Overton's past.”

According to one reader of Final Affair, “This is literally the only police procedural true crime book I've ever read. The book begins with the strange death of Janet Overton, a popular school trustee, which was ultimately classified as a death from natural causes. The case was filed as an open coroner's case, and that was where it languished until Investigator Timothy Carney [one of the book's co-authors] opened a file in his desk drawer on the first day of his new job as a homicide investigator.

The remainder of the book details Carney and his partner's dogged, almost obsessive pursuit of what they are sure was a murder by cyanide and of Richard Overton, the victim's husband, who they become convinced is the murderer and who is also revealed to be a classic antisocial personality or sociopath. Carney and his partner meet and overcome each obstacle that arises during the investigation, knowing that if they fail at any step along the way, the case will be over. Carney becomes relentless in his research and preparation, and ultimately, the case must go before a homicide panel [a group of attorneys each with substantial experience trying homicide cases] before the District Attorney's office will proceed to a grand jury. Carney wins, the case goes before a grand jury, and Overton is arrested. The book ends with his arrest.

The ending of the books is one of its faults. Overton was tried twice [the first trial resulted in a hung jury] and the only information about the trials were two sentences in an Epilogue at the end of the book. This case is bizarre and the evidence is so strange I was curious for some details about what a jury thought or about how the case was tried. This book also needed more details about Richard Overton and the development of his sociopathy. The book is well organized and structured, but the writing is plodding.”