The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 February 1998
by Caleb Carr
This is the story of a serial killer in New York City. Not a new topic, certainly, but Carr sets the tale in 1896, when modern detection methods are just beginning to be developed and when Theodore Roosevelt was the police commissioner. A series of appropriately brutal killings is the motivation for the formation of a team of investigators made up of a police secretary (one of the first women hired by the police department), a reporter for the New York Times, an "alienist", and a few ragged denizens (including two strange police detectives and former patients of the alienist). An alienist, in turn-of-the-century parlance, is what we would today call a psychologist. The murderer's behavior is explored in detail, using the new methods of psychology and forensic science. This brings our heroes up against the outrageously corrupt police department and repressed Victorian society. That intransigence is the core of the book. Finding the criminal, once Roosevelt gives the detectives a free hand, is not too difficult (one might say a little too easy). Carr tells the tale from the point of view of the reporter years later, after Roosevelt's death. Yet the descriptions assume a readership many decades later, providing excessive detail of things that may have been well-known to people at that time. The author seems more concerned with describing an historical setting and a psychological puzzle. He accomplishes both very well, though this reader found the denoument a little cinematic and predictable.