Doomsday Kiss

Somewhere in this tangle of overworked cliffhanger scenarios strung together with outrageous escapes, there may be the germ of a TV movie. Burdened with grossly overwrought prose and trivial exposition, however, this sequel to physician Davis's debut, Plutonium Murders, reads like a burlesque of the medical thriller genre. Back from an international conference on germ terrorism, Salt Lake physician Alex Seacourt pays a nostalgic visit to his old pathology professor and finds her performing a postmortem on the victim of a mysterious, alarming disease. When the pathologist vanishes along with the cadaver, Alex barely escapes death at the hands of professional killers. The ensuing action hopscotches from the White House to the space station Mir-Kennedy I, Africa, Korea, Moscow, N.Y.C., L.A., St. Louis, Long Beach and Dallas, drawing in the CIA, a pair of high-priced whores and an infamous TV evangelist. Meant as a medically savvy James Bond, cartoonish Alex Seacourt plays more like an unwitting Ace Ventura in a doctor suit. (Feb.)