A series of gruesome murders and mutilations of heartrendingly young prostitutes--boys dressed as girls--reunites three alumni of William James' pioneering Harvard psychology lectures: Times reporter John Schuyler Moore, eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (called, after the fashion of the time, an ``alienist''), and New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.... The result is somehow gripping yet lifeless, as evocative period detail jostles with a cast of characters who are, for the most part, as pallid as the murder victims.

Kreizler is a fictional hero, but in Caleb Carr's imaginings he becomes every bit as believable as the book's real-life characters, and the murders he sets out to solve take on a ghoulish plausibility.... The Alienist isn't only an ingenious thriller. Carr brings enormous gusto to his portrait of old New York, where breakfast for the well-to-do might comprise 'cucumber fillets, Creole eggs, and broiled squab'. From the fetid reek of 'stale beer dives' to the baronial splendour of bankers' mansions, from dirt-poor tenements to the fanciest French restaurants, the city seems to rise off the page....Part of the book's triumph is that it accommodates big questions without sacrificing anything in accessibility; it recreates a world that is simultaneously alive and haunting