The novel opens with a reprise of "The Mendelian Lamp Case." Then, in the first unfortunate structural misstep, the book jumps back in time to 750 A.D., for a long and almost completely unnecessary digression about a young man of the Caucasian Tocharian race, which lived in China along the Silk Road, and his obsessive pursuit of information about the "Singers." We figure out quickly enough that the "Singers" are Neanderthals, and that a few have apparently survived to the 8th Century. But (sigh, that tired trope again!) they are a naturally wonderfully spiritual people, and the modern humans have killed them whenever they could. This section is also annoyingly written in colloquial contemporary English, which ruined any hope of conveying the atmosphere of the mysterious past to me.

After this section ends, we return to Phil D'Amato. He is drawn into the investigation of some mysterious corpses which begin to turn up. The corpses look Neanderthal, and carbon date to 30,000 years old. But other evidence indicates that the individuals died recently. Soon, an apparently real Neanderthal is encountered. As D'Amato and helpers in New York, Toronto, and London begin to unravel the mystery, a series of murder attempts are made. He slowly tracks down the threads (pun intended) of the solution: which involves silk weaving, the ancient Tocharians, Neanderthals, and lots of quite implausible speculation about viruses and "natural" genetic engineering, and silkworms, and some rather dodgy explanations of carbon dating. It's hard to say when speculative science crosses the line from fun and interesting to "too silly for words." I dare say that line is in a different place for most people, but this book crossed my personal line, at any rate. And finally, the eventual solution was quite a letdown. Most of it was in place for a long time, so it came as not enough of a surprise.

In addition, as I have said, the book's structure is weak. I have already mentioned the essentially useless second part of the book. The first part was fine as an independent story, but seems uneasily grafted onto the novel, serving mainly to introduce a few characters. The last two parts of the book are a reasonably consistent narration about the mystery of the Neanderthal corpses, but they too are marred by a few very jarring switches from Phil D'Amato's first person narrative to the third-person POV of various different characters. I think Levinson would have done better to find a way to give the reader the information from these scenes through D'Amato's first person POV.

All this said, the book is not without virtues. Levinson has a clever science-fictional imagination, and many of the ideas in the book, taken in isolation, are pretty neat. And despite the structural issues I had with the book, Levinson did keep me turning the pages. He's an engaging writer, and while I don't think this first novel works, the problems are of the fixable sort, and he seems to have the chops to write a fine SF novel eventually.