The one man

*Starred Review* In 1944, as scientists race to devise the weapon to end the war, those in the Manhattan Project need one man: Alfred Mendl, a Polish professor of electromagnetic physics, who worked out a process of separating U-235 from U-238. But Mendl is imprisoned in Auschwitz, where his wife and daughter died and from which only two men have ever escaped. So an OSS officer devises a plan to smuggle an operative into the death camp to get Mendl out. The optimum operative tuns out to be Lieutenant Nathan Blum, a Jew fluent in Polish and German who carries the guilt of being the only member of his family to escape his native Poland during the Holocaust. The narrative toggles between the weakening Mendl passing his formulas to a teen with a remarkable memory (he's a chess champion) and a Nazi intelligence officer who knows something is up and is trying to put together clues. This is a genre departure for Gross, who was inspired by his Polish father-in-law to write a Holocaust espionage novel. While the Mendl plot is fictitious, the background and many characters are historically based, adding compassion and depth to a story that is as moving as it is gripping. A winner on all fronts.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2016 Booklist

After escaping Poland early in World War II, Nathan Blum becomes a U.S. Army intelligence officer tasked with breaking into Auschwitz to rescue Alfred Mendl, a physicist with critical knowledge of atomic bomb development. Meanwhile, in the concentration camp, Mendl, knowing he is unlikely to survive his imprisonment, begins training a young savant to memorize necessary formulas for Allied scientists in the event of a rescue. VERDICT Gross's stand-alone page-turner is a perfect combination of thriller and historical fiction. Readers come to care about the characters' fates as the suspense and tension build. (LJ 6/1/16) © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.