Surrender, New York

June 27, 2016
Bestseller Carr’s ambitious, modern-day crime novel, a potential series kickoff, starts off strong but loses its way. Psychologist Trajan Jones and Mike Li, an “expert in trace and DNA evidence,” now teach online forensic courses out of a classroom in upstate New York, after their work discrediting official crime labs led to their exile from New York City. Their focus is on rebutting the notion that hard science has made criminal psychology and profiling obsolete. But certain odd details, such as Jones owning a pet cheetah, distract from that genuinely interesting debate and tend to make the central plot line less plausible, which involves the deaths of “throwaway children” that the authorities want to pass off, in an overly contrived scenario, as the work of a serial killer. Fans of Carr’s two superior historical mysteries, The Alienist and The Angle of Darkness, should be prepared for heavy foreshadowing and ponderous prose (“But this conception of our foray was to prove wholly inadequate, in manifold ways”). Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME.

June 15, 2016
Carr (The Legend of Broken, 2012, etc.) returns with a curious whodunit that weds leisurely 19th-century storytelling with 21st-century unpleasantness.It's not a demand for the Big Apple to give up to the Wicked Witch. Instead, the title of Carr's new novel, full of echoes of and allusions to its predecessors, is also the name of an upstate town where NYPD psychologist Trajan Jones finds himself in exile, having crossed the brass one time too many. Now, with partner Mike Li, he's teaching criminology online, a fact that lands him new connections--including a student who's caught up in a whole mess of dark secrets surrounding the forest-shrouded burg. Complicating the story are the local gendarmes, a young blind woman who--this being a genre novel, after all--allows a good long glimpse at what's underneath her robe, and--this being a Carr novel, full of quirks all its own--a pet cheetah. Bringing Up Baby it's not, though a sordid twist involving what Carr euphemistically calls "illegal adoption" figures. It takes a good long while for the plot to unfold and the bad guys to emerge, as is the way of most police investigations--and of Carr's Trollope-an style, long on atmospherics and short of car chases and their moral equivalents. And, as always, Carr takes an encyclopedic, parenthetical, village-explainer approach that some readers, used to swifter narratives, might not wholly endorse; along the way, we learn, for example, of the tensions between medical examiners and coroners, who are not the same thing, and why Albany is the capital of New York, for better or worse. Yet Carr's story poses an utterly modern question: for a career-minded politico, which is worse, a child-neglect scandal or a serial killer on the loose? We get to see both at work, including some nicely nasty mayhem: "He'd been hit in the center of the back, the shot shattering his spine and, I found when I turned him over, taking away part of his chest." Carr's many fans will find this well worth the wait.

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August 1, 2016

After writing novels set in the past and future, Carr situates his latest in the present, featuring Trajan Jones, criminal psychologist and expert on Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (the hero of the best-selling The Alienist). Using Kreizler's profiling methods, Jones had much success solving crimes for the NYPD until the political winds changed, and he was fired and exiled to upstate New York. Living on his aunt's farm, Jones enlists his former police partner Mike Li, an expert in trace evidence, to help him teach an online criminal justice class. Soon, though, Jones and Li are asked to consult on a local suspicious death of a "throwaway" kid, a teen who had been abandoned by his parents. As similar deaths occur and are not thoroughly investigated, Jones and Li begin to suspect that someone in power is trying to cover up these crimes. The deeper they dig, the more danger they encounter, and they won't be out of harm's way until they expose the perpetrators. VERDICT Carr fans will welcome another weighty foray into criminal psychology, but several tirades against TV forensics shows such as CSI and current forensics practices occasionally bog down the engrossing mystery. [TNT is adapting The Alienist for television.--Ed.]--Melissa DeWild, BookOps, New York P.L.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
Twenty years after the success of The Alienist (1994) and The Angel of Darkness (1997), Carr once again delivers a high-stakes thriller featuring a new band of clever, determined outcasts. When the bodies of throwaway teenagers or abandoned childrenaccumulate in upstate New York, police suspect it's the work of a serial killer. Using Dr. Laszlo Kreizler's investigative methods, however, criminal psychologists Trajan Jones and Mike Li (with the help of a varied cast, which includes two preteens and a cheetah) soon determine that the staged suicides are too complex for one person. In the same way turn-of-the-century politics permeated Carr's historical mysteries, today's controversies inform the conflict in Surrender, New York (or provide context, as his protagonists would say). A justice system distorted by post-9/11 paranoia, trigger-happy cops, and self-appointed forensic experts constantly impedes the gang's efforts, making their frustration palpable. However, the characters' budding relationships soften the biting commentary, and their genuine desire to find the truth results in a compulsive read as secrets surface layer by layer. With gut-punching twists and the potential for a sequel, this intelligent, timely thriller will be savored by Carr's fans and new readers alike.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)