Come snow - a psychic thriller

A world in which neither truth nor lie are what they seem to be

In September 1939 Dr. Hans Schröder, head of the Sankt-Anna Klinik in Schwarzwald, Germany, receives an order from Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt to initiate the so-called Euthanasia Programme, aiming at the elimination of mentally sick and debilitated individuals within German psychiatric hospitals and sanatoriums. Dr. Schröder, fearing the far-reaching ethical implications, tries to elude the authorities by only pretending to carry out orders. His act is discovered. After interrogation at the Gestapo head quarters in the beginning of 1940, he is sent to the eastern front to serve as a field physician. Following the battle of Stalingrad he is reported missing in action.

In May 1945, however, he mysteriously reappears in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, visiting his wife, still living together with their three children in the old house.

But his return is obviously not as welcome to everyone as he would have hoped for. It seems that his wife, the beautiful Jewess Beatrice, in order to gain protection against persecution from the Nazis, has accepted to marry a certain Dr. Sigfried Rheinau, renowned thorax specialist at the University Clinic, and perhaps a member of the Nazi party. In all events, he was the man who prevented Schröder from obtaining the position as head of a planned institute for paranormal research an assignment which would have spared Schröder the troubles of trying to rid himself of his duties. Schröder has changed so much that his wife does not recognise him when he pays an unannounced visit to their home. Suspecting himself of being the victim of a plot, he fears that Dr. Rheinau will try to kill him if he finds out that Schröder is back in town. He is determined to win his wife and family back, but realises he must now proceed with utmost caution.

One day there is a knock on the hotel door. An American officer convenes him to appear and answer questions in the presence of the Court Martial of the Allied Occupational Forces. Oddly, they have found thousands of documents reporting euthanasia from 1941-1945, signed Hans Schröder. And when an old woman, landlady of the building which once housed his allegedly demised close colleague, Dr. Claus Uhland, is subsequently found murdered, it turns out that Schröder, leading the investigation committee straight to the scene of crime, carries the murder weapon in his own pocket. As time itself, in Dr. Schröder’s perception, takes a leap, the mystery grows more and more dense. How is it possible that the prostitute, with whom he spent the night when the landlady was killed, has vanished? And why does the official report state that Dr. Uhland, his right hand at the clinic, had been found dead in a road side ditch outside Sankta Anna Klinik in November 1942, when in reality he had been found murdered in his bed in April 1945?

Combining structural elements of the detective story, the psychological drama, and scientific (as opposed to science) fiction, the author step by step leads the reader through a concatenation of compelling events. The plot unravels like the opening of Russian Dolls. In the end it is up to the reader to draw the conclusion: did this extraordinary thing really happen, or was it just a drug induced fantasy taking place inside a dying man’s head? Or did it perhaps, strange at it may seem, somehow take place in two worlds simultaneously, one of solid matter, the other of more subtle composition “the parallel worlds”?