Finstad wrote the national bestseller Sleeping with the Devil (1991), a non-fiction novel about the murder-for-hire of Barbra Piotrowski, a California beauty queen in a destructive love triangle with a married Texas health club tycoon named Richard Minns, alleged to have hired the assassins who shot and paralyzed Piotrowski.
Finstad spent the next three years researching and writing Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley (1997), the first biography of Priscilla Presley.