There's almost nothing funny about reproductive science. In-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, DNA testing, cloning -- if these topics move out of the pages of scientific journals and into the public consciousness, they do so only as the stuff of my-baby-has-two-daddies talk shows or teary television newsmagazine tell-all segments. With a title like Heredity, and cover art featuring crudely drawn skeletons and ova, the situations and the humor that Jenny Davidson's debut novel draw out of these topics comes as welcome and refreshing.

Davidson doesn't merely aim for the middle ground between high science and tabloid reporting; nor does her short novel poke crude fun at serious topics. Instead, Heredity blends a broad range of disparate elements: scientific discussion, Bridget Jones-y character study, mild obsession, periodic adultery and 18th-century criminal history. From this grab bag, Davidson assembles a story that touches on serious issues of scientific ethics and thorough historical research quickly and lightly, but without being glib or shallow.

The book revolves around Elizabeth Mann, directionless, thirtyish and mildly messed up, who develops an obsession with the early 18th-century master criminal Jonathan Wild in the course of a travel-guide assignment in London. She begins by discovering his skeleton in an obscure medical museum, comes into possession of a box of his second wife's writings and ultimately becomes fixated with having the dead man's child. Her academic obsession dovetails into her affair with Gideon Streetcar, an infertility specialist and a colleague of her father's who (sometimes unwittingly and sometimes maliciously) feeds both her obsession with the biological and her Electra complex.

Interspersed with increasing frequency in Elizabeth's narration are excerpts from the journals of Jonathan Wild's wife, Mary. Mary's story (naturally) comes to mirror Elizabeth's: She wants, but isn't able to have, her syphilitic husband's child. The dual narrative that develops, 18th- and 21st-century story each shadowing the other, begs comparison, naturally, to A.S. Byatt's Possession, which set the model for this kind of library melodrama. But where Byatt's version is enormous, romantic and sentimental, Davidson's novel is short and sharp. If there's any familial bond between them, then Heredity could serve as Possession's uglier, grittier, surlier cousin.

Heredity's grittiness stems, in part, from Davidson's historical focus. Her command of historical detail shows erudition equal to Byatt's, but the rough-and-tumble of the 1720s is worlds away from Byatt's Pre-Raphaelite repression. Wild himself makes for a fascinating figure: Both Defoe and Fielding, among many others, wrote biographies of him, and Davidson's book comes on the heels of David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper (Ballantine Books), which featured Wild in a large supporting role. But where most retellings of Wild's life focus on his career as "Thief Taker General," managing a network of criminals in order to profit from selling stolen goods back to their original owners and ruling his underlings with the threat of the gallows, Heredity's focus on Mary Wild allows an intimate perspective, and one which partakes fully of the period's taste for the bawdy. Davidson's command of everyday cultural history, her construction of Mary's voice through the journals comes across as both authentic and remarkably readable.

Davidson's narrative skill is not restricted to the book's historical sections, though. Her Elizabeth makes for an excellent narrator, both frank and complex, and the scientific portions of the novel, which have the potential for boredom, come across engagingly. She manages to incorporate complex information organically, without lengthy digressions into arcane technical matters (think Richard Powers). Likewise, her sex scenes -- of which there are several, Elizabeth being rather addictive and self-destructive -- are impressive. Novelistic sex tends to be notoriously difficult to pull off without unintentional humor, but Davidson avoids metaphor and euphemism, building occasionally crude but entirely in-character sequences.

Heredity is hardly perfect; at 200-odd pages, the book is too slim to explore everything Davidson would like it to. Elizabeth's obsession with Wild goes largely unexamined she moves from a strange fascination with his bones to a fixation on bearing his genetically reconstructed child quickly and without much plausible connection. And the book's ending, which attempts to wrap up the plot and resolve Elizabeth's Electra complex in the space of a few pages, lacks nuance, falling into pop-psychology clichés. But, for a first novel, it's a sharp and assured debut.