The Alienist

In 1896 New York, crime reporter John Schuyler Moore, alienist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, using the period term for a psychiatrist, and police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, working outside normal channels because the department itself is riddled with corruption, investigate the murder and mutilation of Giorgio Santorelli, a thirteen year old boy who worked as a prostitute, his eyes gouged out and body arranged in a way that suggests ritual rather than robbery. They are joined by Sara Howard, a police headquarters secretary determined to become the force's first woman officer, and by the Isaacson brothers, two detective sergeants whose enthusiasm for fingerprints and forensic methods marks them as outsiders in their own department. As more boys are killed the same way, Kreizler assembles what the novel treats as one of the first criminal profiles in American police work, reasoning backward from the wounds to the killer's probable childhood at a moment when fingerprinting itself was still new and contested. The investigation is narrated by Moore from 1919, decades after the case, framing the events as history rather than as an unfolding thriller. Carr closes the case with the killer identified as a former army sergeant, John Beecham, whose own abused childhood the novel treats as explanation without excuse; he dies in the climax rather than standing trial, the book ending on the same ambiguous note it opened with about whether understanding a killer's damage changes anything about what he did.

The book is dense with period New York detail, tenements, Delmonico's, the immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side, and it reads like a modern procedural in period clothes, fast for its length.