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“Forget fiction. Pop this jaw-dropper in your
beach bag.” —USA Today
True crime doesn’t get any better than this: In 2008, Clark
Rockefeller, wealthy scion of a great American family,
made headlines when he kidnapped his own daughter and
vanished. The police and FBI were baffled. Tips poured
in, but every lead was a dead end . . . because “Clark
Rockefeller” did not exist.
In a gripping work of investigative journalism, Mark
Seal reveals how German native Christian Gerhartsreiter
came to the United States, where he assumed a parade
of personas, eventually posing as a Rockefeller for
twelve years, married to a woman who had no idea of
his true identity. Fast-paced and grippingly told, The Man
in the Rockefeller Suit is The Talented Mr. Ripley come
compellingly to life.
“A brisk narrative that has all the pace
and drive of a suspense novel.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Riveting.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“No mystery writer would script this—it’s
too unbelievable.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“[An] impeccably reported and fascinating
book.” —Los Angeles Times
“Irresistibly lucid and propulsive . . .
Impossible to put down—Patricia
Highsmith couldn’t have written a more
compelling thriller.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Fascinating.” —People (four stars)
“In striking detail . . . [Seal] unravels the
complex and fantastically bizarre tale of a
man aspiring to the American Dream by
any means necessary.” —NPR
When the fingerprints came back from the lab, one thing was finally clear: the kidnapper
was definitely not a Rockefeller. He was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a forty-seven-year-old
German immigrant who had come to America as a student in 1978. Shortly after his arrival,
he disappeared into what the Boston district attorney would call “the longest con I’ve seen
in my professional career.” The elaborate, labyrinthine nature of Gerhartsreiter’s shapeshifting
adventures, from the time he set foot in this country as a seventeen-year-old student
right up to his disappearance, makes his story more bizarre than any gifted writer of fiction
could possibly invent.
suGGesteD oRDeR
J u n e • P l u m e
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