New York City, 1896. Hypocrisy in high places is rife, police corruption is common place, and a brutal killer is terrorizing young male prostitutes. Unfortunately for the Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, the physiological profiling of murderers is a practice still in its infancy, struggling to make headway against the prejudices of those who prefer the mentally ill- and the 'alienists' who treat them- to be out of sight as well as out of mind. But as the body count rises, Roosevelt swallows his doubts and turns to the eminent alienist Dr Laslo Kreizler to put a stop to the bloody murders- giving Kreizler a chance to take him further into the dark heart of criminality, and one step closer to death.
This turned out to be a run of the mill serial killer story with it's only real point of difference being that of its setting, old New York.
The author is a military historian by trade and does fill the book with interesting snippets on what the city was like at the time of the books setting. This entails full descriptions of the filth and the horrid conditions many of the immigrants lived in and other bits on how corruption ruled the city.
However, the main purpose of the book is a novel about a murderer and as this is the case the author needed a ruthless editor. The book is in excess of six hundred pages and the story would have lost nothing if the editor struck out two hundred of these pages.
There is just too much filler and I found this to be a distraction.
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