Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever s moving portrait of her father, was bailed as a masterpiece by critics. Nov,, she returns to fiction with Doc- tors and Women, a novel about Kate Loomis, a journalist whose protected world comes apart when she finds herself falling in love with the power- ful doctor who is treating her mother for cancer. The doctor is facing his own crisis. After" a decade of medical practice, he is losing the detachment crucial to bis effectivcness with pa- tients and to his own emotional balance. Kate s obsession with I)r. Riley is immediately complicated by his unsettling liaison with another woman. Their troublcd affair, played out against the background of a big- city hospital, propels them finally toward a new understanding of themselves.