The Angel of Darkness

New York, 1897. Sara Howard has left the police department to open her own detective agency, and her first case brings her back to Dr. Laszlo Kreizler: Ana Linares, the infant daughter of a Spanish diplomat, has been abducted while out with her mother — and with Spain and the United States sliding toward war, her family cannot afford to report the crime.

The investigation, narrated this time by Kreizler's former ward Stevie Taggert, reassembles the team from The Alienist — journalist John Schuyler Moore, detective sergeants Marcus and Lucius Isaacson, and Kreizler himself. The trail leads to a nurse whose past does not survive scrutiny, a woman protected by a notorious gang and shadowed by the deaths of children in her care, and the case widens into questions about how the era's medicine, law, and courts treat women accused of violence against their own. An extended courtroom section in the novel's second half, built around a real historical defense attorney, gives the book a different shape than its predecessor: less street procedural, more argument about what a jury can be made to believe.

As with The Alienist, the historical detail is dense and the pace deliberate — a novel more interested in the machinery of investigation and proof than in action set pieces.