The Alienist

In 1896 New York, the mutilated body of a boy prostitute is found on the Williamsburg Bridge, one of a string of similar killings the authorities would rather ignore. Newly appointed police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt quietly turns to two friends: Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, an "alienist" who studies the diseased mind at a time when such work is viewed with suspicion, and John Schuyler Moore, a crime reporter for The New York Times.

Together with the pioneering Sara Howard and two forensically minded detectives, they set out to catch the murderer using a radical new method, building a psychological profile of the killer from the evidence of his crimes. Their pursuit takes them from opulent mansions to the squalid tenements and brothels of the Lower East Side, through a city riddled with corruption and reluctant to look at its own darkness.

The Alienist is a richly researched historical thriller and an early landmark of the criminal-profiling genre. Atmospheric and grim, it brings Gilded Age New York vividly to life while charting the birth of modern forensic psychology.