Andrew Haswell Green is dead. Shot outside his mansion on Park Avenue in the year of our lord, 1903. Born and raised in poverty, a self-made man, Green transformed the island of Manhattan, built its parks and bridges, and watched the city change from a jumbled, littered prospect to a glittering world of money and hope. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him, a life which now, in the hour of his death, may finally be about to break free.

As the detective assigned to Green’s murder chases his ghost across the city, other specters appear: a wealthy negro courtesan, a madman with a broken heart, and an ambitious lawyer whose life-long friendship with Green was the cause of all his joy and all his trouble.

Richly imagined and beautifully told, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed and a life curtailed, and of a murder that took a great man and made him infamous.