disappeared babysitter leads to exploration of Hasidic community

An exhausted new mother gets some help from a Jewish teenager but then the teenager disappears. Juliet can't seem to let this mystery go even though she hardly knows the missing teenager. She eventually succeeds in finding the girl, but you will never guess where or how! ( )

This is a somewhat clever little mystery, which takes the reader into part of the Hasidic population of Los Angeles and New York. Juliet is an amusing narrator, even though she may be harping on about her own physique a little too much and her constant comments about how everyone in Los Angeles is slim are exaggerated - I live there, I can vouch that it's not true! However, it's still fun to hang around with this hormonal, overtired, lactating mother of two while she's trying to solve the mystery of the missing girl. The narrator's relationship with her children and parents is very realistic and the troublesome marriage is described without kid gloves. The solution to the mystery part is a bit haphazard, but for a quick-read mystery, I'll take it. ( )

I fell in love with Ayelet Waldman’s sleuth, Juliet Applebaum, on the first page of The Big Nap, when she answered the door topless (and, oh my, you should have seen the look on that FedEx guy’s face!).

Okay, she was wearing a nursing bra…but it was unsnapped in order to air-dry Juliet’s nipples. “Or they can crack,â€? she explained to the blushing deliveryman.

Meet Juliet—harried mom, amateur gumshoe and endearing character.

From the start, we know we’re cozying up to someone as unique as Sam Spade, Miss Marple or Easy Rawlins. Waldman’s Mommy-Track mysteries (the first was Nursery Crimes, the latest is Playdate With Death) bring us a sleuth who juggles murder with motherhood and fumbles her way through both with charm, wit and intelligence. It’s refreshing to see someone nab a criminal while pushing a stroller and wearing a blouse blotched with baby puke.

Juliet is a Harvard Law School graduate, former public defender, wife to a Hollywood writer who produces screenplays like Flesh Eaters and stay-at-home mom to four-month-old Isaac and three-year-old Ruby. She’s a juggler:

Only a mother of an infant knows that it is in fact possible to take a shower, wash your hair, and shave your legs, all within a single verse of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.â€? The trick is finishing the E-I E-I O’s with your toothbrush in your mouth.

Soon, she’ll be juggling more than she bargained for when her babysitter, a girl she just met, mysteriously disappears. Fraydle, a beautiful young Hasidic teenager, seemed to be hiding a few secrets—including a rendezvous with a handsome Israeli hunk in a leather jacket, which Juliet happened to see the day before Fraydle’s disappearance.

With a fussy Isaac in tow, Juliet starts snooping around Fraydle’s family and the close-knit Hasidic community, hoping to find out what happened to her babysitter, because, after all, Fraydle was the only one who could get the wailing infant (or “mutant vampire,â€? as his mother affectionately calls him) to sleep long enough for Juliet to take a big nap. The missing-person case soon takes on ominous overtones as Juliet probes deeper into the religious community and Fraydle’s relationship with Yossi, the handsome Israeli she was secretly canoodling with.

The Big Nap moves quickly and delightfully to its surprising climax, thanks to Waldman’s own confidant juggling act. Oh sure, some of the circumstances might strain credulity a bit, but Waldman keeps the pace so tight and her mommy-sleuth so quirky that it’s hard to quibble. Juliet never pretends to be as cognitive as Sherlock or as tough as Spade, but she’s funny and sympathetic and she won my heart completely.

With the perfect mix of humor, suspense and the occasional commentary on the joys (and agonies) of motherhood, Waldman is one mystery novelist who’ll leave her readers wailing for more. ( )