[An American novelist, Ellis is best known for such novels as Less than Zero (1985) and American Psycho (1990). In the review below, he provides a mixed assessment of The Alienist.]

Manhattan, 1896. A serial killer haunts the city, mutilating boy prostitutes. In order to solve the case, Theodore Roosevelt, as New York City's police commissioner, brings together John Moore, a police reporter for The New York Times, Sara Howard, a police secretary, and Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, an old school chum who is now a brilliant "alienist" (in the 19th century, the mentally ill were called "alienated," and psychologists were thus labeled "alienists"), whose theories on child-parent relations pre-date Freud and provide insight into the mind of The Alienist's warped monster-cannibal.

What makes this novel so potentially fascinating is that these three are not detectives, and in the face of a skeptical pre-forensics society, they solve this mystery not by matching fibers and semen samples but by amassing a psychological profile of the killer. The Alienist is a large, commercial mixture of solid, impersonal craftsmanship and gothic horror; it's also a historical novel of New York manners dressed up in a garishly lurid thriller plot. It's prissy and ghoulish.

The writer, Caleb Carr, a contributing editor to Military History Quarterly and the author of a biography of soldier of fortune Frederick Townsend Ward, uses his formidable skills as a historian to good effect, but attached to a pulpy, middlebrow thriller, they ultimately (at least for the first three-quarters of the book) help sink it. The case under investigation is as gruesome as anything out of James Ellroy, but it feels as if it had been rewritten by James Michener. Paramount Pictures has already staked $500,000 on Carr's story for producer Scott Rudin, but whether the studio is going to be willing to spend the additional $60 million it will take to re-create turn-of-the-century Manhattan for Cruising-Meets-Edith Wharton is another, altogether more immediate mystery.

The book's narrator is John Moore, the Times reporter, who is, unfortunately, the least interesting character. Since he's a journalist and not a novelist, we get long, impressively detailed descriptions of Delmonico's, the Metropolitan Opera, what 10th and Broadway might have looked like on a foggy spring morning 100 years ago. This is all un-leavened by dialogue that is almost completely expository—huge blocks of info bereft of drama. For all its elegance, The Alienist lacks the nasty, prankish fun—the dirty kick—we expect from a thriller. It's a stodgy, plodding Masterpiece Theatre-style thriller, so genteel that one can almost hear the ghost of Alastair Cooke narrating in the background, until you realize the ghost of Alastair Cooke is narrating in the background. It's a "literary" humanist-liberal story with an anachronistic smattering of P.C. elements that seems pandering: the wildly independent career woman, the noble black bodyguard, a fairly contemporary concern with gay prostitution and psychology.

As a historian, Carr knows more about 1896 New York than any writer under 40, but as a novelist he's smart in all the wrong ways. His fusion of a murder mystery with the politics of the historical moment provides enticement, but The Alienist is only sporadically suspenseful and often stylistically moribund. There's no point of view here, no attitude, nothing suggestive or elliptical or ambiguous. Our narrator is a straightforward, spotless good guy. For all its historical data and abundance of arcane exotica, as a novel it's a chore to read because it veers toward the mechanical and the clichéd. Its only real concern (and attribute) is to be an entertainment.

And as far as entertainments go, it is a big and busy one, and protracted as it is (500 pages), it's technically accomplished. Talent and taste (sometimes too much) are evident. Almost every chapter ends with a cliff-hanger, and at its core is a killer with some genuinely creepy tics. The action picks up in the last 100 pages as a showdown nears in the bowels of the Croton Reservoir, and these elements help make Carr's book a cinematic tome—but imagine Merchant-Ivory remaking a 1950s Hammer horror flick and you'll get the idea.