The Rat Race

Lieutenant Commander Frank Jacklin dies aboard the U.S.S. Alaska in a flash of atomic light, and wakes up as Winnie Tompkins, a dissolute stockbroker with a drinking problem, a wife, a mistress, and a secretary who all want something from him. Strip-mined of his identity, his rank, and his certainty about who he really is, Jacklin must navigate a decadent 1950s Manhattan while searching for the man whose body he now wears, and wondering if he's the only one who's been transplanted between lives. The setup plays like a Cold War twist on the Jekyll and Hyde formula: a decorated naval officer trapped in a world of business lunches, political machinations, and three women who each love a different version of the man he's pretending to be. Jacklin knows things no stockbroker should know, impending disasters, classified secrets, and that knowledge might be the only thing keeping him alive in a world where everyone's lying about who they are. It's absurdist body-swap sci-fi with a hardboiled edge, asking the question every mid-century American man secretly feared: what happens when you're not the person you thought you were?