SOURCE: "Of an Erudite Sleuth Tracking a Madman," in The New York Times, March 29, 1994, p. C17.

[Lehmann-Haupt is a Scottish-born American critic and novelist. In the review below, he remarks on the themes of The Alienist.]

You can practically hear the clip-clop of horses' hooves echoing down old Broadway in Caleb Carr's richly atmospheric new crime thriller, The Alienist, set in 19th-century New York City. You can taste the good food at Delmonico's. You can smell the fear in the air.

The year is 1896. On a March night so cold that horse waste has frozen in the streets, John Schuyler Moore, a police reporter for The New York Times, is awakened in his grandmother's house at 19 Washington Square North and summoned to the site of the newly begun Williamsburg Bridge, on the East River. There he encounters the new Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, so grimvisaged that his huge...