Great Read!

Author's Rating:

Pros: great characters, well-researched, riveting

Cons: none!

Author's Review
I bought a tattered copy of Caleb Carr's The Alienist at a yard sale on a Sunday morning. On Monday I was scheduled to get up at six a.m.

I read the book compulsively all day Sunday. I read while I cleaned. I read while I cooked. I read and read and read. I stayed up until three a.m. finishing the book. Then I spent all of Monday groggy and tired.

And I didn't regret it for a minute.

Caleb Carr has written a book that I put unreservedly on my mental top-ten-books-of-all-time list. I quite simply could not stop reading until I was finished with it. And then I was disappointed because I was finished with it. I wanted to read more.

It was well-researched, well-written, with quirky characters that lived inside those pages. Caleb Carr wrote some of the most real people I ever read about. I knew their motivations, I knew their inner thoughts, I knew who they loved, I even knew their faults. They were real.

This book is destined to be a classic. It is about the search for a serial killer before they were known as serial killers, indeed before much of anything was known about psychological motivations for murder (or other things)at all. Many, many threads run through this fascinating book, and I refuse to tell you about them for fear it will ruin it for you.

Read it. You won't regret it.