REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:

   

CALEB CARR – The Alienist. Random House, hardcover, 1994. Bantam, paperback, 1995. TV adaptation: A ten-episode limited series on TNT, January 22 to March 26, 2018.

   Carr is a young native of NYC with a degree in history who writes frequently on political and military affairs. His first novel was one of the bigger ones of ’94, and I missed it. Why is it that I get review copies by the basket that I wouldn’t read on a bet, but not the ones I want to? I actually had to buy a second-hand copy. It’s not fair.

   It’s 1896, and Theodore Roosevelt is Police Commissioner of New York City. Dr. Lazlo Kreizler is a controversial psychologist, or “alienist.” John Schuyler Moore is a crime reporter for the New York Times. The three men met in their youth at Harvard, and now they must form an unlikely and secret alliance. Someone is killing the city’s children, and viciously mutilating their bodies.

   Dr. Kreizler believes it is the same someone, and that he will kill at increasingly shorter intervals. His theories about insanity are so unpopular that Roosevelt cannot be publicly associated with him, so they must work covertly to catch the murderer, a serial killer before that was a phrase for it, or public that would or could believe in it.

   I’m enough of a literary snob that it goes against the grain for me to admit I like a bestseller, but I’ve got to ’fess up — this was a damned good book. A serial killer book, too, and I don’t like those at all. I’m always amazed when a young writer and first time novelist writes so well.

   It’s a fascinating detective story, as well as being an equally fascinating picture of New York City at the end of the 19th century. Carr’s slowly painted portrait of the killer is chilling, and his characterizations of the team following him solid. I would have liked to have seen Moore, the narrator, a little better developed. But it’s hard to quarrel with the foci Carr chose.

   It’s a thick book, and at times I thought the very picture of the city that I found so interesting slowed the story a bit too much. All told, though, it was an excellent book and would surely made my 1994 awards list.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #19, May 1995.