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Imagine a mystery novel sans middle aged lonely guy, hyper-femme perp or insanely effacing schoolmarm. In “The Big Nap”, the second novel in the “Mommy-Track Series” by Ayelet Waldman, we don’t even get a self-respecting set of four inch pumps. Don’t even think of asking for generic blood n’ guts n’ guns n’ cigarette smoke swirling into the blue. 

Here’s what you do get in “The Big Nap”: crackling sarcastic monologue, a breast-feeding instruction, an impressive South Park-like number of belches, a peek at the rarefied world of an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, and a sustained moment-by-moment travelogue of the privileged though stressful experience of a former Harvard Law School graduate named Juliet Applebaum, turned part-time sleuth and full-time mommy... Volvo station wagon and all.  

Berkeley resident Ayelet Waldman, whose first book, “Nursery Crimes”, launched the Mommy-Track Mystery Series, is herself a former Harvard Law School Graduate turned full-time mommy. She is married to Michael Chabon, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction.  

The postman does not ring twice in The Big Nap. The novel opens with the Fed Ex man at the door, delivering “yet another sterling silver rattle from Tiffany (that made seven),” and a bare-breasted Juliet Applebaum explaining the finer points of nipple care. Immediately we’re drawn into drama: Four month old “mutant vampire” Isaac won’t sleep and his mother is half out of her mind from fatigue.  

A solution presents itself in the form of gorgeous though virginal Fraydle Finklestein, a young ultra-Orthodox woman with baby-sitting prowess and the ability to drive handsome flat-stomached non-Orthodox 20-something former Israeli paratroopers wild. Fraydle baby-sits for Juliet one time... during which Juliet enjoys an entire two hours of sleep.  

Almost immediately the luminous Fraydle vanishes, her parents are unwilling to file a missing persons report with the police and exhausted heroine Juliet Applebaum is out of a baby-sitter and may never have the opportunity to nap again.  

Where is Fraydle? Was she kidnapped? Did she run off with the cute paratrooper? Could her disappearance have something to do with the fact that she’s just gotten engaged? (You know how dangerous marriage can be.) Juliet Applebaum’s curiosity is piqued. Or maybe it’s just that you don’t find baby-sitters like Fraydle growing on trees.  

Juliet Applebaum may go quite mad if she doesn’t get another shot at a nap … and so the race to find Fraydle is on. With her two kids in tow, Juliet Applebaum takes on the investigation, while in the background her workaholic husband, Peter Wyeth, seems to be spending entirely too much time with his lovely assistant, nicknamed “Maximum Mindy,” and the protagonist’s parents step in, here and there, to add touches of color.  

Like its namesake, The Big Sleep, a novel by Raymond Chandler which was turned into the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, directed by Howard Hawkes, The Big Nap contains some stunning way-bigger- than-life Hollywood action, plenty of sizzling double entendre, and a vision of parenthood that is on the radical end of extreme. 

Ayelet Waldman will read from The Big Nap on Sunday, July 15, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books in Berkeley.