The Great Mistake
A novel
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3.7 • 27 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, about one man's rise to fame and fortune, and his mysterious murder—“engrossing” (Wall Street Journal), “immersive” (The New Yorker), and “seriously entertaining” (The Sunday Times, London).
Andrew Haswell Green is dead, shot at the venerable age of eighty-three, when he thought life could hold no more surprises. The killing—on Park Avenue in broad daylight, on Friday the thirteenth—shook the city.
Born to a struggling farmer, Green was a self-made man without whom there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him that now, in the hour of his death, may finally break free.
A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed, a murder that made a private man infamous, and a portrait of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him—yet enlarged it.
Customer Reviews
Meh
What a fascinating tale this could have been. Instead it’s written like a series of vignettes taken from historical documents and plopped into novelistic form. No feeling for any characters beyond the superficial, less understanding of main character’s motivations, a steady stream of incomplete sentences that don’t provide enough realism. Interesting idea poorly executed. It was a struggle to get through. Avoid.