Naturally, Tom makes scads of money by providing this illicit service. He's become an expert at abducting babies during the narrow window before they receive the permanent, irremovable computer chip that will let authorities track them.

Next up is Sasha Egan, a student at a Massachusetts art school who has had the misfortune to be knocked up by a dolt named Gary Cargill. Deciding to birth the baby and put it up for legal adoption, Sasha relocates to a Florida home for unwed mothers. But Gary, with the help of Sasha's domineering rich grandmother, Maeve Donovan, tracks Sasha down and asserts his unwanted claim to fatherhood. Sasha manages to flee to Savannah, Ga., where she goes into hiding and is eventually delivered of a male infant she names Jimmy.

The last part of our fated triangle is Jake Zorn and his wife Maury. Jake is a famous television personality, a muckraker known as "the Conscience of Boston." Jake and barren lawyer Maury desperately want a child, like so many of their aging peers. When Jake stumbles onto Starbird's services, he thinks the answer to their quest has been found. But Starbird, sickened with his life and experiencing pangs of conscience, is just about to get out of his sleazy business. Jake threatens to broadcast an exposé of Starbird unless Jake gets what he wants.

But Starbird has only one prospect for a timely theft: the newborn of a lonely girl named Sasha Egan.

Mothers of intervention

Kit Reed has a knack for striking upon hot-button topics and probing them from odd, illuminating angles. (Her award-winning novel from 2004, Thinner Than Thou, for instance, concerned body image.) When you combine her flair for fast-paced and intricate plotting (under her pen name Kit Craig, Reed has written numerous thrillers) with this ability to dig deep inside her protagonists, you are guaranteed novels that demand rapid devouring yet release time-capsules of moral, intellectual and ethical ambiguity. This latest book is no exception.

By alternating her chapters among Sasha, Starbird and Zorn, Reed ensures that the reader will not fall into the trap of dividing these tormented, seeking humans into opposing camps of villains and heroes. Each one of them exhibits mingled vice and virtue. Reed scalpels through their heads in a kind of interior monologue fashion that is actually, in this case, the much-neglected author-omniscient point of view. (For instance, when describing Sasha's room, comparison to Starbird's living habits are made, a comparison Sasha herself would be unaware of.) Reed's wry voice adapts itself to each character but remains a unifying thread.

Like some seasoned Victorian author, Reed also peppers her text with judgments, observations and aphorisms. ("Once you've agreed to shoot yourself in the foot, no matter what your motives you've shot yourself in the foot. The interesting part is discovering whether it hurts and what comes down after.") But the effects she achieves are far from antiquated or fusty, as her language and tone and insights are utterly au courant.

The only thing missing from this book in a science-fictional sense is some depiction of the societal and cultural changes we might expect from the changed conditions described. Couldn't we have seen something like, oh, I don't know, a store that sold RealDoll babies for those who can't have children, or young girls playing a video game that simulated motherhood? Reed's future, even if it's only tomorrow, reads as too similar to our present. But perhaps avoiding such trappings is what allows her to focus all her fictional energies on her complex, engaging examinations of such fundamental issues.