In The Consciousness Plague, the heir apparent to the commissioner’s job, Jack Dugan (who is D’Amato’s boss) is under attack on two fronts. First he is fighting a nasty case of the flu, but what concerns him more is a series of deaths of young women, all by strangulation. In ruminating about these deaths, he reasons that New York has enough bizarre cases to merit the establishment of a task force devoted exclusively to them, and Phil D’Amato with his talent and interest in unusual crimes would be the perfect candidate to head the group.

It is several days before D’Amato replies to Dugan’s request, during which time Dugan has, with the assistance of the antibiotic Omnin, recovered from the flu. When Phil tries to accept Dugan’s offer to head the task force, Dugan acts as if he had never tendered the offer. Aware that several other people, including himself, have experienced memory lapses, Phil believes Omnin, which is known to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, is responsible for the memory loss.

D’Amato’s mission becomes two-fold. He wants to find the person responsible for the rash of strangulations, seemingly unique enough to be the work of a serial killer. He also is convinced Omnin, in its present form, could create many disasters through critical memory disruption of a large number of people.

Mr. Levinson has attempted an ambitious project in his latest Phil D’Amato thriller. The plot is exceedingly complex, requiring many small details to come together in a rational manner to achieve a logical ending. A rather daunting task, to say the least, and one in which the author has not been entirely successful. At numerous junctures in the story, to solve contradictions in the plot, memory lapse is used as an excuse. True, faulty memory is a key ingredient in the story, but every time things get sticky, somebody’s memory problem rushes to the rescue. Mr. Levinson has written several works in the science fiction area and perhaps this scenario is appropriate in that genre, but the present setting purports to be more realistic fiction so the device doesn’t work as well.

The novel also contains much material that is only tangentially relevant. There is ample speculation about the role of memory lapse in an historical context. The main protagonist wonders if a glitch in his memory system prevented Coleridge from completing his work about Xanadu, which had such a promising start. Or, Phil muses, could the Phoenicians have developed their alphabet because they feared not being able to remember things they felt were important. These tidbits are rather interesting sidelights, but not critical for the present story.

Phil D’ Amato is a fortunate individual. The NYPD is indeed tolerant of his tendency to get sidetracked . No one reprimands him for spending lots of time learning about the roles of helpful vs. harmful bacteria within the human body when young women are being murdered at an alarming rate around the city. His superiors also don’t seem to say much when he decides to take on the FDA to try and make them limit the use of Omnin. Do police departments really allow that much latitude for their employees to pursue causes?

There are too many inconsistencies and irrelevant material in this novel. My need for order and logic precludes my enjoyment of this story. Those who have more tolerance in these areas may find more to like.

--Andy Plonka