The strongest presence in The Sleeping Boy is not a character but a town: Barbara Stewart’s Belford is a rusted Midwestern industrial “museum of leftovers,” distinguished by its gray river, struggling populace, and corrupt old-money families. The city is a forensic sample of Bush’s with-us-or-against-us America, a place in which there are only winners and losers. The Sleeping Boy is about how a woman who had everything opted for nothing, and the attempts of two other women to understand what happened.

Dazzling, accomplished Dr. Leah Mallick is a golden girl with a charmed professional life and a perfect home. As the novel opens, the renowned psychiatrist and her financier husband are discovered dead in a murder-suicide; the Mallicks’ injured eight-year-old son, however, remains alive in a coma. Called to the crime scene is Lieutenant Annie Shannon, director of communications for the city police department.

Middle-aged Annie is exhausted: her personal life is unfulfilling; the pressures of being a police PR rep are from hell; and her daily hours have become punctuated by menopausal hot flashes. As the case unfolds, Shannon becomes haunted by the destruction of the Mallick family. When it emerges that Dr. Mallick was in line for a powerful political appointment, and that she was linked to a shadowy health-services multinational, another investigator enters the picture. This is Susan Shaw, a high-level Washington bureaucrat who joins forces with Annie Shannon; soon the two of them are battling big lies in high places.

Although not technically a medical thriller, The Sleeping Boy offers up some state-of-the-art twisted science. Stewart has uncovered a paranoiac’s dream – fresh, real-world visceral horror that seems just one newspaper headline away. It’s too bad, then, that some readers’ attention will have flatlined before The Sleeping Boy delivers its denouement. Stewart’s structure is frustrating: the murder investigation doesn’t pick up momentum until halfway through the novel; the flashbacks arrive too late and feel too contrived; we never meet a certain senator who seems pivotal to the plot; and the poor coma kid languishes unvisited in the hospital for over 100 pages.

Worse, as the novel progresses, Stewart so insistently stresses Dr. Mallick’s unrealistic dream-babe qualities that we become bored with her. Perversely, the gorgeous, flawless doctor ends up less fully present in this novel than does the sleeping boy.