The Alienist at a Glance

• The Alienist was first published in 1994
• Spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list
• The novel was inspired by his relationship with his natural father Lucien Carr.
• The novel became a 10-part TV series and began on January 22, 2018 on TNT
• The TV series was nominated for various awards and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects
• The TV series is set to produce a sequel to the Alienist based off Carr’s second book The Angel of Darkness – set to air in 2020
• Caleb Carr is a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and the series editor of the Modern Library War Series.
• Carr’s writings have been published in numerous magazines and periodicals including The World Policy Journal, The New York Times, and Time magazine

Book Summaries

The Alienist (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler Series #1)

The year is 1896. The city is New York. Newspaper reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned by his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler—a psychologist, or “alienist”—to view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy abandoned on the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge. From there the two embark on a revolutionary effort in criminology: creating a psychological profile of the perpetrator based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who will kill again before their hunt is over.

The Angel of Darkness (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler #2)

It is June 1897. A year has passed since Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a pioneer in forensic psychiatry, tracked down the brutal serial killer John Beecham with the help of a team of trusted companions and a revolutionary application of the principles of his discipline. Kreizler and his friends–high-living crime reporter John Schuyler Moore; indomitable, derringer-toting Sara Howard; the brilliant (and bickering) detective brothers Marcus and Lucius Isaacson; powerful and compassionate Cyrus Montrose; and Stevie Taggert, the boy Kreizler saved from a life of street crime–have returned to their former pursuits and tried to forget the horror of the Beecham case. But when the distraught wife of a Spanish diplomat begs Sara’s aid, the team reunites to help find her kidnapped infant daughter. It is a case fraught with danger, since Spain and the United States are on the verge of war.

The Alienist at Armageddon (Dr. Laszlo Kreizler #3)

(To be released September 2019)  With his friends at his heels, Kreizler takes up his own case, and the cases of the other explosions. Amid the turmoil in New York City, they receive a news report: the RMS Luisitania, a British passenger ship bound for Liverpool from New York with Americans on board, has sunk mysteriously just eleven miles off the Irish coast. With international tensions high at the onset of the Great War, and many in Europe clamoring for American intervention, Kreizler’s case threatens to embroil not only his own life, but the lives of his countrymen, in the greatest and most deadly conflict modern civilization had ever seen.