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What it argues
The Alienist is set in 1896 New York City, where Dr. Laszlo Kreizler — an "alienist," the period term for a psychiatrist — is asked by police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to investigate the murders of boy prostitutes whose bodies have been left on the city's bridges. Kreizler assembles an unofficial team including journalist John Schuyler Moore (the narrator), two progressive-minded detectives, and Sara Howard, a woman working as a secretary in the police commissioner's office who is far sharper than anyone around her wants to acknowledge. Together they attempt something new: building a psychological profile of the killer before he strikes again.
The book's real subject is the collision between a rigidly stratified society and the modern idea that a killer's childhood shapes his violence. Kreizler is a difficult, driven man who believes that environment and trauma produce criminality — a radical view in 1896. The investigation keeps running into institutional resistance from powerful men who want the murders buried, because the victims are social outcasts whose deaths the city prefers not to examine. The novel is as much about who gets protected and who gets discarded as it is about catching a killer.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel dramatizes the actual origins of criminal profiling — the idea that a killer's biography and psychology can be reconstructed from the evidence he leaves behind.
- 2.
Sara Howard is one of the more interesting figures in the book: a woman doing serious intellectual work in a world that won't grant her official authority to do it.
- 3.
Carr shows how institutional power protects certain crimes. The murders continue partly because the victims are expendable in the city's social calculus.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Caleb Carr is an American military historian and novelist born in New York City in 1955. He studied military and diplomatic history at Kenyon College and taught military history at Bard College. The Alienist, published in 1994, was a major bestseller and was followed by a sequel, The Angel of Darkness (1997), which continued the story of Kreizler and his team. A television adaptation of The Alienist appeared on TNT in 2018, followed by a second season. Carr has also written works of military history and nonfiction.
