Just Finished Reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr

The Alienist is a short historical fiction mystery novel by Caleb Carr.  Published in 1996, he followed up on it by publishing two much more lengthy books featuring alienist psychiatrist/detective Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, whose designation "alienist" refers to his professional views that adult behavior is directly traceable and attributable to childhood events, relationships, and circumstances in their lives.  His method has brought great healing among many, and some of them count as his loyal assistants.  In The Alienist Kreizler teams up with newspaper report John Moore (first-person narrator) and Sarah Howard, a police secretary, to solve a series of grisly murders in New York City, mainly of boy prostitutes.  In this year 1896 the police of the time tend to ignore such victims, but the current police commissioner, none other than Theodore Roosevelt of later presidential renown is determined to end the killings and find the culprit: he hires Kreizler to secretly investigate the crimes.  The rest of the story goes into Kreizler's pinpointing of the suspect based on murder scene evidence, informal witness interviews and research of news and police archives.  And, of course, there is a very climactic scene at the end.  I picked The Alienist to read from one of the lists of "top 100 books" that somehow keep finding its way onto my social media newsfeed, so I decided to give it a try.  Carr portrayed a different New York City as it was 125 years ago, including a giant water reservoir in Mid-Manhattan where the New York Public Library now stands.  The story was later adapted to a television series...perhaps you've seen it (I haven't).  I was greatly impressed with Caleb Carr's attention to detail, as well as his depiction of the criminal underworld running rampant in that city during this era and which had its tentacles spread through the politics, police, and press of the time.  I'm looking forward to the next (and much longer) book in the series, titled The Angel of Darkness...