Slow Funeral Synopsis

Fate stamped Jack Cain’s dance card fifteen years before his birth.

His father, a staff photographer with Patton’s Third Army in March of 1945, stumbled upon a place near the German town of Worms: a children’s camp known as Camp Rainbow on the former grounds of Hausser Pharmaceutical. Here he found and photographed young Gypsies, Slavs, Poles, and Jews--the untermensch—being treated to comforts enjoyed only by privileged Germans. When he returned two weeks later, the camp had become a ghost town.

The secret of this place dies along with his parents in an automobile accident, the only remaining clue is a box of photographs discovered by Jack in his parents’ attic.

Years later, Jack is a forty-five-year-old surgeon in Ann Arbor whose life has become a slow funeral. His four-year-old daughter, Sara, dies tragically, his wife leaves, and a patient’s family sues him for voluntary manslaughter. Although he wins the suit, Jack retreats from life and slips into seclusion.

But when confronted by a pair of Eastern European refugees, Jack realizes that he cannot escape his father’s truth. Suspicious of Camp Rainbow’s connection with dark purposes, Jack is convinced by his captors to take a job as a surgical technician at Hausser’s North American headquarters in Atlanta. He moves to Atlanta and into a web of deceit and illusion. He is the only person in a high-stakes game of corporate espionage who does not know why he is really in Atlanta. The opponents have gnawed at each other for years and, innocently, Jack serves as the catalyst that ignites a reaction with unbelievably horrible consequences.