National Network for Equitable Library Service

From the acclaimed author of High Dive comes an enveloping, exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, a story of one man's rise to fame and fortune, and his murder in a case of mistaken identity. On Friday the 13th of November, 1903, a famous man was killed on Park Avenue in broad daylight by a stranger. It was neither a political act nor a crime of passion. It was a mistake. The victim was Andrew Haswell Green, the "Father of Greater New York," who shaped the city as we know it. Without him there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. His influence was everywhere, yet he died alone, misunderstood, feeling that his whole life might have been, after all, a great mistake. A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is a portrait of a self-made man--farm boy to urban visionary; the reimagining of a murder investigation that shook the city; and the moving story of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him, and, in spite of all odds, enlarged it.