Mark grew up in the St. Louis area before receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois and his master’s degree from Northwestern University. He has had a lifelong passion for reading and history, particularly military history, and the idea for Für Elise can be traced back decades to when he first read that the Soviet Union detained some of their German POWs for more than a decade after the end of World War II. He recalls thinking that the story of those POWs would make an interesting novel, but it took years of research and a visit to Dresden before Für Elise came to fruition. He currently lives with his family in the Chicago suburbs.