A historical thriller, based on real events and with a mixture of historical and fictional characters. In early 1962, the dermatologist Prof. Günter Stüttgen — a real doctor who appeared in one of Kopetzky's earlier novels in his capacity as a humanitarian hero during the closing days of the Ardennes campaign — was sent to Lammersdorf, near the picturesque town of Monschau in the Eifel, to manage a smallpox epidemic there.

As epidemics go, this wasn't a very spectacular one: 37 people became seriously ill and one died. But over the course of four months, hundreds of people had to be placed under quarantine restrictions. Kopetzky uses the situation (and implicitly his perspective from writing during the Covid-19 pandemic) to look at the way people react to such restrictions and make sometimes very irrational decisions. The epidemic cuts right through the Carnival season, one of the most important parts of Rhineland culture, and local people aren't going to give that up without a fight.

Moreover, Lammersdorf, like so many remote German villages, has a single large high-tech employer, producing industrial furnaces in this case (the Otto Junker works in real life, the "Rieterwerke" in the novel). Any interruption to production could have catastrophic consequences for the town's economy and the careers of local government officials. And, of course, there are all sorts of unresolved questions from the Nazi period still hanging around. Industrialists who had clamoured for slave-workers to keep their production going twenty years earlier were now seeking guest-workers from Spain, Greece and Turkey, and weren't looking for anyone to start commenting on the parallels...

It all makes for quite an entertaining and readable thriller, but there's nothing very special here. Kopetzky follows the conventions of the genre in things like his inability to mention a car without specifying make and model, and he dumps a little too much irrelevant background period detail on us (yes, the Hamburg floods make an interesting story, but we know it already, and it has nothing to do with smallpox in the Eifel...). The love-plot is rather too obviously bolted on to the historical narrative, and there are rather too many events and characters in the story that don't lead to anything. ( )