Dr Sweet and His Daughter Peter Bradshaw Picador, 343pp, £10.99 ISBN 0330492160

A not very successful cancer researcher, having just been sacked from his job, dumped by his girlfriend, told by his ex-wife that she's taking his daughter to live in America, and then arrested for a crime he didn't commit, accidentally becomes a national hero and finds his life transformed by the power of celebrity.

Peter Bradshaw's second novel is an intelligent, well-detailed exercise in melancholy comedy, but the point of it isn't altogether clear. The emphasis keeps wandering about from Dr Sweet - always referred to as "Dr Sweet" in the narrative, though the other characters mostly call him "David" - to his little daughter Cordie, his ex-wife Alice, his Australian girlfriend Hattie and his uptight parents, John and Rosemary. They all have quite different concerns and preoccupations. And then there's the business about the absurdities of the media.

The crime Dr Sweet didn't commit is murder. In fact, the victim wasn't murdered: he slipped and banged his head. At the time, however, he was menacing a little girl with a broken bottle. Dr Sweet, a mere bystander, nervously suggested that he calm down. The man turned on Dr Sweet and just happened to fall over. The police, misinformed by another witness for reasons that never emerge, think Dr Sweet brained him with the bottle.

In the cells, Dr Sweet keeps forgetting that they've taken away his watch. "What's the time? Wrist. Wonder what the time is? Wrist. How long have I been in here now? Wrist." Bradshaw is rather good at getting inside the characters' heads and reproducing highly likely bits of mental scribble. John, for instance, feeling a twinge of arthritis, remembers how he once "heard a CD of his son's, playing a song called 'Everybody Hurts', and for a moment he'd thought that it was the only pop song he had ever heard that could appeal to his generation, so long as everyone understood that it was physical pain the lyrics referred to". Dr Sweet, after a near-miss with a pavement cyclist, reflects that riding on the pavement has become "like soft drugs or the incorrect use of the word 'disinterested'" - something it's "quaint" to protest at. Hattie, in the grip of a romantic disappointment, suddenly feels 15 again, not just because she's crying in bed, but because of the specific sensation of tears trickling into her ears.

The snag is that Bradshaw tends to overdo the psychological observation when dealing with Cordie. The solemn laying out of her everyday fantasies, her stratagems for getting her own way, and her thoughts on such phenomena as carpet stains and the iridescence of hair in sunlight, takes up a lot of space and the effect is oddly unconvincing. Her innocent self-absorption assumes a sort of architectural gravity that isn't quite right.

One of her better moments comes during the media feeding frenzy. A journalist discovers that the dead man was a registered sex offender and Dr Sweet is lauded in all the papers as a "have-a-go-hero". Freed on bail, he gets "a 21-flashgun salute" wherever he goes. Cordie notices something: "When the photographers saw she looked sad, they just stopped taking pictures. It was just like on holiday. But when she did another little smile just before reaching the car, they did some more flashes." And naturally, they could easily take "sad" pictures to suit a more hostile bias.

A BBC radio presenter not wholly unlike Jenni Murray disapproves of Dr Sweet's alleged vigilantism and skilfully pitches him aggressive, loaded questions while maintaining a pretence of impartiality. But a TV presenter not wholly unlike Esther Rantzen decides to give him one of her "Hearts of Gold" bravery awards. He almost forgets that he didn't actually do anything. The treatment of all this is funny and perceptive, but it leads nowhere in particular. Though the novel is good on relationships, the family, office politics and the mid-life crisis, as well as the media machine, Bradshaw's excellent writing is offset by the problems of overall shape and focus.

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