Recommendation The Alienist

The Alienist.

It is historical fiction that takes place during the Gilded Age and is set in NYC. The primary characters are a newspaper reporter (narrator of the book), a psychiatrist, two police detectives, a police secretary and a number of assistants the psychiatrist has helped throughout his career and became part of his crew.

The story is about the psychiatrist and his team, at the direction of Teddy Rosevelt, investigate a serial killer who prays on prostitutes.

The author Caleb Carr at the time of writing the book was a military historian so the setting of the book is meticulously researched and Carr works in historical figures and settings, such as JP Morgan, Adolf Meyer.

One of the primary early events of the book takes place in Teddy Rosevelt’s office when he was the police commissioner of the NYPD. A major theme of the book is inline with the gilded age as organizations moved away from conventional wisdom to more science based approaches.

The title of the book comes a widely held notion that people who had mental illness were alien their body, therefore psychiatrists were called Alienist.