Catch Your Breath

In a premise similar to that of her last novel, Sleep, Baby, Sleep, a mother plunged into dire legal trouble over her alleged mistreatment of her young child is at the center of Auerbach's harrowing new one. Here, it's charges of child neglect and abuse, not of kidnapping, that face Rosie Sloan, who's separated from her husband, police officer Quinn. The diagnosis of their son, Jason, as an asthmatic and the attacks that send him to the local ER have recently brought the couple back into each other's lives. But Quinn has a new, young girlfriend, Diana, while Rosie is dating the ER doctor who treats Jason. The plot thickens when someone--whose identity is shielded by law--makes a claim to the Department of Children and Families that Rosie neglects Jason. A smug social worker inexplicably agrees that the charge is warranted, and so Rosie must go to court, all the while wondering whether Quinn or Diana, or both, instigated her troubles. During the proceedings, the court takes Jason away from Rosie, forbidding all contact, placing the child first with Quinn and then in a foster family after Quinn allows Rosie to see the boy. Rosie's ER paramour, meanwhile, seems unconcerned about Jason's deteriorating health. Throughout, readers are treated to an intricate and intriguing tour of family law at its most unjust and, when Rosie puts all the pieces together, to a paranoid scenario worthy of Oliver Stone. The highwire-walking plot eventually falls off line, but Auerbach's urgent prose keeps the entertainment from flagging even then. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections; TV rights optioned by Citadel Entertainment. (July)