The Pied Piper's Poison

It is the winter of 1946, the wake of World War II. A group of refugees at a quarantine camp is southern Poland has fallen victim to a horrific, unidentifiable disease. Robert Watt, a young, callow Scottish doctor, is sent to identify the mysterious affliction working its way through a growing list of victims.
Called up is the winter of 1648, when the German town of Hamelin was struggling through the Thirty Years War, the most savage war Europe has ever known. Besieged by a vicious mercenary army, confounded by the endless machinations of its leaders, and gripped by starvation, fever, and vermin, Hamelin was desperate for any respite.
In sinister counterpoint to the Polish plague, the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin lurks. Conveyed in the coolly dispassionate mode of an academic case study, the interplay of these two calamities' shared provenance acquires force by the accumulation of a series of uncanny parallels, warning of the power of history to revisit the present, disguised in its methods but uncompromised in its tragic effects.