Favorite Books of 2016 - Patrick Clark

Writers read!  And here is one of our By the Bay 2 authors’ favorite books of 2016.

Written by Patrick Clark

Book Title:  The One Man

Author:  Andrew Gross

Genre: Thriller

Setting:  World War II

Format:  e-book

Pages:  432

Publication date:  August 23, 2016

Publisher:  St. Martin's Press

Opening Line: (From the Prologue) The private room is on the fourth floor of the geriatric wing at the Edward Hines Jr. Veterans Administration Hospital outside Chicago, bent, old men shuffling down the hall in hospital gowns with nurses guiding them and portable IV's in their arms.

Review: Parachute into Nazi occupied Poland, sneak inside the Auschwitz camp, pose as a camp prisoner and find a brilliant physicist with vital knowledge that could change the outcome of the war or, perhaps the course of human history, then sneak him out of the camp and escape back to the United States.  That was the incredible task assigned to Lieutenant Nathan Blum.  More incredible is the fact that much of this fictional story is loosely based on real events.

Andrew Gross's new novel, The One Man, is an exceptional story that I could not put down.  It is a dramatic thriller set against the backdrop of World War II and the horror of the Nazi concentration camp.  It's the story of a physicist with technical knowledge critical in the development of the first atomic bomb and the Allies desperate effort to rescue him from the camp.  Gross weaves the fictional story largely from true events and many of the characters are drawn from stories handed down from Holocaust survivors.

The book is emotional, the characters are vivid and the story pits good versus evil from page one to the end. It's suspenseful, riveting and it will make you think about those dark days

About the author: Patrick Clark is the author of “Boneyard” and "The Town Hall Incident" in By the Bay: East Beach Stories.  His story “Dead Drop” will be in Volume II, to be published in 2017.  For more information on Patrick and his other writings, please visit his website: www.patrick-clark.com.