dischordia's Full Review: Caleb Carr - The Alienist
I took the book along as travel reading. During the hum and sway of my long Greyhound trip, I became engrossed.
The Alienist begins in 1919 with the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt. From there, the reader is sent back to 1986 NYC. A knock on the door in the wee hours of the morning. A savage crime scene.
There is a great hesitation by most of the NYC police department to investigate this crime, and an equal reluctance of the press to cover it. Thus current police chief, Theodore Roosevelt, creates an unofficial investigation team made up of a reporter, an alienist (early term for a pyschiatrist), two police officers, and a female police department secretary.
The reader is pulled headlong into the day to day life of turn of the century New York. With all it's timeless charms and seamy underbelly.
Using revolutionary techniques for the time, such as finger printing and handwriting analysis, as well as psychological profiling, the team closes in on the identity of the serial killer.
Unfortunately, the killer is also closing in on them as well.
The book is very well written and paced. The sense of discovery that comes from each chapter is augmented by understated foreshadowing. Clues, hunches, and dogged footwork lead to a general idea of the killer, then a name, then an address, and finally, a confrontation.
And this is where The Alienist falls a bit short for me.
The ending (which I have no intention of giving away) seems forced. Fake. There was very little in the way of payoff for my reading investment but...
The ending is such a very small part of the whole story, I can deal with it's weakness.
General Fiction - Step into another time--and unforgettable terror. The year is 1896. The city is New York. The hunt is on for a baffling new kind of ...More at Barnes and Noble
Now back in print--this fast-paced, convincing New York Times bestselling thriller is set in New York City in 1896, where two men and a brave, determi...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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