The Alienist

The location is New York City, and the year is 1896. Reporter John Schuyler Moore of the New York Times is called to the East River on a chilly March evening by his friend and former Harvard classmate, psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, sometimes known as the "alienist." They see the horrifically disfigured corpse of a teenage boy who was a prostitute from one of Manhattan's notorious brothels on the incomplete Williamsburg Bridge.

In a rather unconventional move, Theodore Roosevelt, the recently appointed police commissioner, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, relying on Moore's familiarity with New York's extensive criminal underground and Kreizler's restrained intelligence. Sara Howard, a courageous and resolute lady who works as a police department secretary, joins them. Working covertly (the public views alienists and the newly formed field of psychology with suspicion at best), the unlikely team starts a groundbreaking project in criminology: using the specifics of the man's crimes to build a psychological profile of him. They are drawn into the dark history and deranged thoughts of a killer who has murdered in the past and plans to kill again before the search is finished by their perilous journey.

The Alienist is a fast-paced, captivating story that captures the essence of the Gilded Age and its untainted side. It has grotty tenements and lavish palaces, shady police officers and flashy mobsters, gleaming opera theaters and seedy gin mills. The story is told with the exactitude of a historian. This is New York in the era when it may be fatal to challenge the societal norm that all murderers are born, not created.