In our hard-driving consumer culture, people will do anything to get what they want, but what if all you want is a baby of your own? Among careerists who postpone parenthood, fertility problems abound. Adoptions have always been difficult and now you can forget about "shopping" abroad because America's borders were closed by the Centers for Disease Control. Babies are high end commodities in this economy, microchipped at birth to protect them from theft.

When medicine fails you and you can't adopt, Tom Starbird's your man. Soft-spoken, as charming as he is efficient, the baby merchant will steal a child for you. For a price. If you pass his tests. This is Starbird's mission in life. He rescues "unwanted" babies and delivers them to loving homes. But even do-gooders get tired. Tom is shutting up shop when hard-driving Jake Zorn, the Television Conscience of Boston, blackmails him into doing one last job. His barren wife Maury wants a baby but there are reasons why they can't adopt. Zorn will do whatever it takes to bring one home.

A conscientious provider, Tom locates a supplier. Translation: a mother with a child she doesn't want. This brings him up against lovely, rebellious Sasha Egan, an artist planning to have her baby and give it up. Stalked by her unborn child's father, Sasha is on the run. She has no way of knowing that Starbird has targeted her. Or that the baby she never wanted is the one thing in life she will do anything to keep. One last job, Tom tells himself, tracking the fleeing pregnant girl into rural Georgia. Then I quit. Everything goes smoothly until he makes a terrible mistake.

He gets in too deep with the supplier-- and the product.

This new novel by the author of the award-winning Thinner Than Thou is a swift, hair-raising ride through the anxiety of a pregnant woman on the run, the compelling love-hate relationship between hunter and hunted, the nature of guilt and the excitement of a near future that is, to all intents and purposes, already here.