The novel is written in the traditional prose style of the police procedural, but this detective, instead of meeting fences for information in seedy Harlem bars, is flying out to UCLA to discuss the bicameral mind theories of Julian Jaynes with an anthropologist. The odd combination leads to some awkward prose:

I loved the way this guy talked and thought. It was almost poetry. But it was hard to pin down the meaning

D'Amato ultimately concludes that the memory losses are caused by a popular new antibiotic, Omnin, that he speculates damages some type of organism or symbiote in the brain, thereby disrupting short term memory. For no very convincing reason, he decides that the invention of the alphabet by the Phoenicians may well have been a defense against a similar memory loss. He brings in as well as the societal amnesia that caused the trips to North America by the Vikings, and perhaps other explorers who may have included those same Phoenicians, to be forgotten for centuries.

D'Amato ultimately does solve his serial killings. The two mysteries are brought together in the end, by devices that feel more like authorial trickery than logical plot development.

Levinson has a good SF premise and creates interesting characters. But weaknesses in the writing and plotting lead to a novel that is less than the sum of its parts.