Cancer Finally Brings Down Gross

In addition to the news that UK mystery-fictionist Peter Lovesey died this week, we hear that American thriller writer Andrew Gross has passed away from aggressive bladder cancer. He was only 72.

Gross was born in New York City, won an English degree from Middlebury College in Vermont and later a master’s degree in Business Policy from Columbia University, and after stints with his family’s clothing-manufacturing company and other similar enterprises, attended the Writers Program at the University of Iowa. He went on to spend three years composing his first novel, a political thriller titled Hydra. “The book found no buyers when it was sent out in 1998,” Publishers Weekly explained back in 2018, “but it did land Andrew a very important fan—James Patterson.

Gross wrote six number one best-sellers with Patterson, starting the popular Women’s Murder Club series. Then, in 2006, he went solo and since then has written one best-selling novel a year. He began with edge-of-the-seat thrillers, kicking it off with The Blue Zone. The plots were tight, the dialogue rich and the characters multi-dimensional. In short, the kind of books you couldn’t wait to read and were eager to get to the finish to see how it all came together.

In the mid-2010s, Gross jumped from delivering contemporary action-packed yarns to penning powerful historical novels. The One Man, which first saw print in 2016, was a World War II-backdropped techno-thriller described by Rap Sheet critic Ali Karim as “a truly remarkable tale, one that reminds me of novels by Alistair MacLean and Eric Ambler ...” Gross followed that up with The Saboteur (2017), Button Man (2018), and The Fifth Column (2019).

But a diagnosis of bladder cancer turned his life upside down. He was told he had “a rare variant called plasmacytoid,” which sent him to a series of medical specialists. As he wrote this last February in James Patterson’s Substack newsletter, his life became one filled with doctor’s visits and increasingly intrusive medical procedures. At least “I was alive,” he said. “I had my family, my sense of humor, my belief in myself, and I never, ever for a second thought I wouldn’t find a way to beat this thing, no matter how formidable the odds. I grew familiar with an expression I have used many times as my situation has fluctuated over the months. Any cancer patient understands it: It damn well beats the alternative.”

That dreaded alternative came to claim Andrew Gross this week, just over a month shy of his 73rd birthday, on May 18.