It all starts as a typical July Fourth weekend at the Congress, the internationally famous Catskill resort hotel. Thousands of vacationers, their pockets filled with cash and their minds on easy sex, begin to arrive from the city. But while the singles meet at the pool and other folks congregate at the bar, a time bomb is slowly ticking: an outbreak of cholera so devastating that the wildest holiday of the year quickly becomes a deadly nightmare.
Along the way we meet:
*Ellen Golden, recently widowed owner of the Congress, who fights to rescue an old family tradition from the hands of organized crime,
*Sandy Golden, Ellen's thirteen-year-old daughter, who discovers her own budding sexuality in the midst of chaos,
*Dr. Sid Bronstein, the man who discovers the menace but keeps silent to save his own skin,
*Bruce Solomon, a young medical detective who is determined to find the cure at all costs,
* Fern Rosen, the shy "single" who captures Bruce's love--when he least expects it,
*Nick Martin, a smooth operator who wants to bring big-time gambling to the Congress, no matter what the opposition,
*Melinda Kaplan, the nymphomaniac divorcee, taking sex wherever she can find it, and
*Grace Kaplan, Melinda's disturbed son, acting out all of his adolescent fantasies.
A medical disaster as well as a love story, Weekend by Tania Grossinger and Andrew Neiderman is a Fourth of July no reader will ever forget.
