All right, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist came out way back in 1994.  I wasn’t going to review it here, just put it under the Buried Treasures and Guilty Pleasures category, but, for me, it doesn’t belong there.  So, since it took me so long to finish the damn thing, I thought I would rate it and post it.

The Alienist is one of those books that I had always intended to read, but somehow never got around to it.  I, by chance, found a handsomely used copy at one of my local book stores.  I thought it was time to read it.  So I began reading it…back in December, and didn’t finish it until just near the end of February.

In 1896, there is a killer on the loose in New York City.  Someone is killing boy-whores.  You read that correctly.  Police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt is desperately trying to apprehend the murderer, but he and his detectives are getting nowhere on the case.  Roosevelt enlists the help of two close friends:  crime reporter John Moore and alienist (psychiatrist) Laszlo Kreizler.  It’s a move on Roosevelt’s part that would be a public relations nightmare if discovered because, apparently, at the ending of the 19th Century and start of the 20th, nobody much cared for psychiatrists.  In fact, it seems most everybody downright hated them, what with their odd techniques and getting into peoples’ minds (figuratively and literally) and such.


Kreizler and Moore assemble a trusted team of detectives, three who are not dirty, but are relatively new to the job, and they also enlist a couple of Kriezler’s former patients, and one little deviant scamp.  The team sets about working up a profile of the killer as the victims increase, learning a little more and a little more with each new crime scene and mutilated body.  It’s kind of Criminal Minds and CSI: NY 1896.

Carr provides some great period detail and historical knowledge, but that can’t overcome the truth that the story is a little flat.  Thomas Harris (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs) he is not.  The Alienist isn’t even as fun and entertaining as second rate, doing-it-for-the-money Thomas Harris (Hannibal Rising).  The book wasn’t what I was expecting, and it wasn’t a good thing in this case.  Maybe a shorter version would have improved it, made it less tedious.  It’s not all bad, don’t get me wrong, but there is too much fat on this cut.

3 out of 5
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