The One Man (Gross)

The One Man 
Andrew Gross, 2016
St. Martin's Press
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250079503


Summary
Poland. 1944.

Alfred Mendl and his family are brought on a crowded train to a Nazi concentration camp after being caught trying to flee Paris with forged papers. His family is torn away from him on arrival, his life’s work burned before his eyes.

To the guards, he is just another prisoner, but in fact Mendl—a renowned physicist—holds knowledge that only two people in the world possess. And the other is already at work for the Nazi war machine.

Four thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, Intelligence lieutenant Nathan Blum routinely decodes messages from occupied Poland. Having escaped the Krakow ghetto as a teenager after the Nazis executed his family, Nathan longs to do more for his new country in the war.

But never did he expect the proposal he receives from "Wild" Bill Donovan, head of the OSS: to sneak into the most guarded place on earth, a living hell, on a mission to find and escape with one man, the one man the Allies believe can ensure them victory in the war.

Bursting with compelling characters and tense story lines, this historical thriller from New York Times bestseller Andrew Gross is a deeply affecting, unputdownable series of twists and turns through a landscape at times horrifyingly familiar but still completely new and compelling. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Middlebury College; M.B.A., Columbia University
• Currently—


Andrew Gross is an American author of thriller novels including four New York Times bestsellers. He is best known for his collaborations with suspense writer James Patterson. Gross’s books feature close family bonds, relationships characterized by loss or betrayal and large degree of emotional resonance which generally lead to wider crimes and cover-ups.

Early life and education
Andrew Gross was born in New York City in 1952. He grew up in Manhattan and attended the Barnard School for Boys. Both his father and his grandfather on his mother’s side were successful clothing manufacturers; they ran the Leslie Fay Companies, named after his mother.

Gross received a degree in English from Middlebury College in 1974. In 1979, he met his wife, Lynn, on a blind date in New York City, and they married three years later. In 1982, he received a Masters in Business Policy from Columbia University.

Business career
After a two-year stint in Denver, where he worked as a dress buyer, he opened a stew-and-soup fast food pilot named Ebeneezer's. He eventually went back to work for his family's publicly held apparel firm, the Leslie Fay Companies.

In 1984, Gross took over Head NV Sportswear, the struggling arm of the iconic ski and tennis brand, and by 1989, had repositioned it into the number one upscale producer of tennis and ski apparel in the U.S. and as a thriving brand in Europe as well. He left that endeavor for a larger role at Leslie Fay (which then had close to a billion dollars in annual sales and, by then, listed on the New York Stock Exchange).

As Gross describes it, "sometimes the toughest thing about being in a family company is that it's filled with your own family", so in 1991, he left to pursue his own opportunities at Le Coq Sportif, a boutique tennis/golf brand, and Sun Ice, Inc., a Canadian skiwear manufacturer. The Canadian firm, however, ended "poorly and abruptly", as Gross says, "hastening my writing career."

Writing
Gross attended the Writers Program at the University of Iowa. It took three years to finish a draft of his first book, Hydra (1998), a political thriller. He recalls that time:

After dozens of rejections from agents and ultimately publishers, not knowing what my next step in life was, and sitting around my study, wondering what cliff I was going to drive our SUV off of, I received a phone call from someone who asked, "Can you take a call from James Patterson?"

Gross met with Patterson and discussed the early concepts for what ultimately became the Women's Murder Club series. Patterson explained that the head of his publishing house had forwarded Gross's unpublished manuscript to him with the words scratched on the cover: "This guy does women well!" Patterson and Gross formed a partnership in less than a week.

Gross worked with Patterson on several books in this series, including Second Chance and Third Degree, both of which became best sellers. Then, they branched out on different themes together, co-authoring other bestsellers: The Jester, Lifeguard and Judge and Jury.

Solo career
In 2006, Gross left Patterson to pursue a solo writing career. In 2007, The Blue Zone debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list. A year later, Gross followed up with The Dark Tide (2007), which the International Thriller Writers Association nominated Thriller of the Year. That book's detective Ty Hauck of Greenwich, Connecticut, became the lead character in several other Gross's conspiracy-based bestsellers, Don't Look Twice (2009), Reckless (2010), and One Mile Under (2015). These collectively are referred to a the Ty Hauck series.
In all, Gross has written 10 books on his own, preceded by his five books with James Patterson.

His tenth book, The One Man departs from Gross's usual crime thrillers. Set in World War II, it concerns an attempted rescue of a (fictional) world-renowned physicist from Auschwitz. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/24/2016.)

Book Reviews
(Starred Review.) [A] harrowing, thematically rich thriller.... [This] deadly odyssey into and out of this 20th-century hell drives toward a compelling celebration of the human will to survive, remember, and overcome.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred Review.) As moving as it is gripping. A winner on all fronts.
Booklist


(Starred Review.) [A] heart-pounding thriller set in the bowels of Auschwitz.... [D]on't bet on the outcome of this one, and do keep your tissues handy. This is Gross' best work yet, with his heart and soul imprinted on every page.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)