contemporary mystery novel with SF underpinnings, The Consciousness Plague is a sequel to 1999's The Silk Code, which won its author the Locus Award for best debut novel in its year of publication.
As was its predecessor, this book is cast as the first-person narrative of Phil D'Amato, forensics expert for the NYPD. Having uncovered a tangled web of plots and counterplots in his previous adventure, concerning Amish bio-engineering and Neanderthal survivals, D'Amato now finds himself dealing with a more simplified two-part mystery. On the one hand, a serial killer is loose in the city, slaughtering young women of a particular type. The search for the killer is founded on relatively straightforward police work familiar from numerous similar tales. But complicating the investigation is a larger enigma.
New York is experiencing a hard flu season, and doctors across the metropolis are prescribing a new antibiotic named Omnin. Omnin is the first antibiotic to cross the blood-brain barrier, making it particularly effective against such infections as meningitis. But those who take it for the flu get some unintended side effects. Bits and pieces of their memories are excised, leaving them with blanks in their past. Both D'Amato and his live-in lover, Jenna, fall victim to this disturbing malady, and D'Amato resolves to uncover the roots of the problem, before Omnin can go into nationwide distribution.
His investigations take him to California, England and Chicago, seeking the advice of a ragtag passel of experts on such strange issues as the Phoenician alphabet and the medical practices of Irish monks. As the pieces begin to cohere into a whole, D'Amato realizes that human brain functioning holds secrets no one else suspects, and that Omnin threatens the very stability of civilization. In tandem with this, his search for the serial killer heats up to a dramatic conclusion.
A private investigator without pizzazz
Paul Levinson's new novel is patently an organically conceived whole, rather than the patchy fixup of The Silk Code, and on that level is more sophisticated. But whereas the earlier book possessed a certain manic vitality thanks to its all-over-the-place narrative, and also packed in some secret-history thrills comparable to those in the classic film Five Million Years to Earth (1967), this new book is pedestrian and scant on both visceral impact and intellectual bursts.
Let's start with D'Amato himself. He's not hardboiled, he's not ironic, he's not establishment, he's not comedic, he's not brilliant. Falling out of those five classic P.I. slots, D'Amato comes across as the lowest-common-denominator detective. He's an earnest Everyman, operating on a shoeshine and a hunch. The reader is frequently two steps ahead of him, and his unexamined virtuousness begins to wear thin after a while. The fact that those around him, friends and enemies alike, fall dead like tenpins (this happened in The Silk Code as well) makes him seem like some kind of Jonah, spreading malaise rather than health.
Then there are the dual mysteries at the core of this book. The serial-killer riff has been done a thousand times before, and Levinson dispenses with it competently if without inspiration. For SF readers, the obvious hook is the revelations about how our consciousness functions: intriguing enough, but basically a one-note motif. And once formulated, the insights are never developed into any kind of new paradigm that might go on to influence science. In fact, these new findings are slated to disappear, just as the massive disruptions of the first book are totally ignored in this one. Except for a line or two in Chapter 5, it's as if none of the events of The Silk Code ever happened. This hitting of the RESET button, so common in sitcoms and comic books from episode to episode, undercuts any emotional or cultural resonance.
Compared to other loner-against-conspiracy novels, such as F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series, Levinson's latest delivers too little too mildly.
