(FORTUNE Magazine) – It is certainly plausible that Dr. Michael Swango, the subject of James B. Stewart's latest book, is "one of the top serial killers in American history"--a murderer even worse than better-known serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. According to Stewart, the FBI believes that Swango may have killed up to 60 people, hospital patients under his care whom he injected with poison. He also had a nasty habit of sprinkling dangerous but nonlethal doses of poison into the food of people he knew--co-workers, girlfriends, landladies--inducing vomiting and nausea that could last for weeks.

But this, remember, is a Jim Stewart book, and so one must approach such claims about Swango with a measure of caution. After all, in the 1991 bestseller that made him famous, Den of Thieves, his account of the rise and fall of Michael Milken, the former Wall Street Journal editor accused Milken of being at the heart of "the greatest criminal conspiracy the financial world has ever known"--a claim that strikes one now as ludicrously hyperbolic. In attempting to justify that claim, Stewart wrote a book that was as much prosecutor's brief as narrative, gliding past inconvenient facts, overdramatizing mundane anecdotes, and generally making Milken appear to be the worst guy who ever walked the earth. Eight years after it was published, Den of Thieves doesn't hold up well.

In Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away With Murder, all the classic Stewart traits--both good and bad--are on display. On the one hand, he is a dogged and skilled reporter, with a talent for getting people to talk to him. The story line is compelling, and the book is a great read. Stewart's prosecutorial tendencies are, as ever, front and center--though this time, Lord knows, they seem justified. Stewart is clearly outraged that Swango was able to practice medicine after he'd been convicted of poisoning co-workers (he didn't kill them, but he made them very sick). This is not a subtle book; but then, Jim Stewart books never are.

The problem is that even a book about a serial killer requires at least a little subtlety. Stewart's goes on and on about Swango's supposed "charm" but never squares that trait with his utterly opposite characterization of Swango as a man openly obsessed with mass murder, who described Bundy as his hero. He also has an unfortunate tendency to blame Swango for every bad thing that ever happened to anyone who came into contact with him. (He did the same thing with Milken, by the way.) For instance, one of Swango's long-suffering girlfriends commits suicide, an act that Stewart implicitly lays at the doctor's feet. But it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that she had her own problems. For whatever reason, she stuck by him even after she sensed he was a monster.

Here's the biggest problem, though--what might be called the Bob Woodward problem, since it is a trait Stewart shares with the famed investigative reporter. As great as he is at finding things out, he overreaches when it's time to put his findings in context. Like Woodward, he wants to develop grand themes, but they don't necessarily jibe with the facts he's uncovered. For instance, Stewart claims that we need to be on the alert for hospital-based serial killers because they represent a scary and growing trend. But he can cite only a tiny handful of such cases--hardly a trend.

More crucially, he claims that Swango was able to continue his killing spree for years because of a massive cover-up by the "medical establishment." But the evidence he presents doesn't come close to making that case. Yes, there was one serious cover-up--at Ohio State, where Swango did his residency and was allowed to leave quietly despite a series of suspicious deaths he left in his wake. (The nurses suspected foul play; most of the doctors didn't; the university administrators blocked investigators.) But at every stop Swango made afterward--especially after emerging from a prison term for poisoning those co-workers--he was rooted out. Newspapers exposed him. Doctors who had been gulled by his charm wised up and got rid of him. Investigations took place. Swango himself felt that he could never outrun his past, and that appears to be right. In one instance, an outraged doctor sent a letter to every medical school in the country warning them of Swango. It is clear that the authorities didn't put this psychopath in jail fast enough, but a cover-up? Not really.

Is Blind Eye worth reading? Yes: Jim Stewart's books always are. But take it for what it is rather than for what it aspires to be.

--Joseph Nocera