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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Imaginative and fulfilling . . . an addictive contemporary crime procedural."--Michael Connelly, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, returns with a contemporary, edge-of-your-seat thriller featuring the brilliant but unconventional criminal psychologist Dr. Trajan Jones.
In the small town of Surrender in upstate New York, Dr. Jones, a psychological profiler, and Dr. Michael Li, a trace evidence expert, teach online courses in profiling and forensic science from Jones's family farm. Once famed advisors to the New York City Police Department, Trajan and Li now work in exile, having made enemies of those in power. Protected only by farmhands and Jones's unusual "pet," the outcast pair is unexpectedly called in to consult on a disturbing case.
In rural Burgoyne County, a pattern of strange deaths has emerged: adolescent boys and girls are found murdered in gruesome fashion. Senior law enforcement officials are quick to blame a serial killer, yet their efforts to apprehend this criminal are peculiarly ineffective.
Jones and Li soon discover that the victims are all "throwaway children," a new state classification of young people who are neither orphans, runaways, nor homeless, but who are abandoned by their families and left to fend for themselves. Two of these throwaways, Lucas Kurtz and his older sister, Ambyr, cross paths with Jones and Li, offering information that could blow the case wide open.
As the stakes grow higher, Jones and Li must not only unravel the mystery of how the throwaways died but also defend themselves and the Kurtz siblings against shadowy agents who don't want the truth to get out. Jones believes the real story leads back to the city where both he and Dr. Kreizler did their greatest work. But will Jones and Li be able to trace the case to New York before they fall victim to the murderous forces that stalk them?
Tautly paced and richly researched, Surrender, New York brings to life the grim underbelly of a prosperous nation--and those most vulnerable to its failings. This brilliant novel marks another milestone in Caleb Carr's triumphant literary suspense career.
Praise for Surrender, New York
"[A] page-turning thriller . . . For maximum enjoyment: surrender, reader." -- The Wall Street Journal
"Every word of fiction Carr has produced seems to have been written in either direct or indirect conversation with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even those that take place in contemporary times, like this one. . . . [ Surrender, New York ] allows Carr to deploy his indisputable gift for the gothic and the macabre, and the pursuit is suspenseful and believable." -- USA Today
"[A] long-awaited return." -- O: The Oprah Magazine
"[An] engrossing mystery." -- Library Journal
"A compulsive read . . . Carr once again delivers a high-stakes thriller featuring a new band of clever, determined outcasts. . . . 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." -- Booklist (starred review)
"Carr's many fans will find this well worth the wait." -- Kirkus Reviews
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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 children accumulate 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.--Hyzy, Biz Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE CRIME NOVEL, in its most serious form, has always been used to reflect trends and lament losses and clang the bell of warning to the ills of society. In a good-versus-evil world the painstaking and dangerous steps of the undaunted investigator were the things that riveted the reader while the clever author slipped the message in with the prose. Raymond Chandler said, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Untarnished and unafraid is easy. But where are those mean streets today? Detective work has changed dramatically in the last quarter-century as science has seemingly replaced shoe leather. Investigators are more likely to solve a case with a walk to the forensics lab than down the mean streets where a murder has occurred. Greatly improved collection of fingerprint and ballistic evidence and their attendant and ever-growing databases routinely ferret out the guilty - or at least the accused. And then there is DNA. Despite some early bumps in its judicial rise (the O. J. Simpson case, in particular), DNA has become the magic bullet, the slam dunk used by prosecutors coast to coast to leverage the guilty plea that avoids the trial. It is little wonder that arguably the most popular television franchise of this era was about crime lab technicians who solved crimes in hours instead of days and weeks. With this the state of the system in reality and entertainment, what is a serious crime novelist to do? If you are Caleb Carr, you create an investigator who is a man of science yet who also possesses a jaundiced eye when it comes to the science of crime detection, a man who clangs that bell of warning: We may have gone too far. Carr is best known for "The Alienist," a beautifully wrought novel set more than a century ago at the dawn of behavioral profiling and other detective sciences. In "Surrender, New York," he has written an addictive contemporary crime procedural stuffed with observations on the manipulations of science and the particular societal ills of the moment. Call it mystery with multiple messages. The steady beating heart of the novel is provided by the criminal psychologist Trajan Jones, late of the New York City Police Department, now living in exile in the upstate town of the novel's title, where he spent much of his youth. He has a sidekick named Mike Li, who is an equally exiled trace-evidence expert. The two ran afoul of the N.Y.P.D.'s politics and practices too many times. They now teach online criminology classes for the state university out of Albany. An old plane in an old hangar is their classroom, set with multiple video screens for the benefit of students who Skype in to class. But of course darkness soon descends on Surrender, and the local sheriffs come calling on Jones and Li. A teenager is dead - the latest in a series of strange deaths of young boys and girls. A serial killer may be stalking the rural community, and investigative skills are greatly in demand. With the game afoot, it is not long before Jones and Li focus on an epidemic of teenagers' abandonment by parents and society. They bring in a young assistant named Lucas to help them navigate and understand this world of "throwaway children." It becomes the dark secret pulsing beneath the community and at the center of the case. They proceed undaunted down these mean streets, but their investigation is not without danger. There are those of power and wealth who are willing to kill to keep some uncomfortable truths from being revealed. Carr writes with a style full of depth and description. He never uses one sentence when there is room for two. The book weighs in at a dense 600 pages, which requires more dedication (from the reader as well as the writer) than is usual for a crime novel. But Carr's work has never been for the book-a-day reader. Every character and location is multilayered and heavily defined, and that would include even the animals - the mysterious pet Jones calls his "rare African hunting dog" named Marcianna. The reader is treated to many history lessons, including the journey, across four continents, of a pre-World War II aircraft from Germany to New York - perhaps a nod to Carr's other writing as a military historian. It adds up to a languid but intoxicating pace. This is a novel you set time aside for. It is charming and eloquent between the horrors it captures. A mobile home gets a grim 150-word description before we even view the truly horrible contents inside. But that lengthy description ends, like all such accounts in Carr's capable hands, with words that can't help propelling the reader to enter: "If ever a place promised not only a crime but a history of singularly grim details, we had reached it." Jones and Li go through that door, and the reader is more than willing to follow. The story is imaginative and fulfilling, along the way revealing how so many are left in the shadows even in a prosperous nation. Perhaps best of all, the novel sets up a future. It appears unlikely that we have seen the last of the goings-on in Surrender, N.Y., or of Jones and his team - including the "dog." Carr skillfully links this story to his bestknown work by making Jones the world's leading authority on Laszlo Kreizler - the Alienist - and a practitioner of his philosophies. The mystery is high-grade stuff, but this allusion makes one of the central messages of the book even clearer. If "The Alienist" celebrated the dawning era in the application of science to crime detection, from fingerprinting to other means of physically and psychologically identifying suspects, Carr now uses Jones to sound the warning that things may be going awry. Forensics should not be treated as faith. "Mike and I worked to disabuse our students, first, of the widely accepted idea that forensics (not only trace and DNA collection, but such far older practices as fingerprinting and ballistics, as well) were the 'gold standard' of evidentiary analysis and courtroom argument, and second, of the equally popular and pernicious notion that forensics had made criminal psychology, and especially profiling, somehow obsolete." Jones and his team set off on an investigation that proves their thesis, swooping down as a "righteous scythe" on society and the guilty as they go. While the story is hypermodern in subject matter, it feels decidedly old-school in its delivery. Jones uses a cane and takes slow, measured steps. He narrates the novel in the same way, delivering the story in contemplative and starchy prose, sounding not only like the academic he now is but also like a man seemingly from another time and place. "My partner and I had always fancied ourselves two servants of justice," he says. "With the throwaways case, the always exquisite and rare opportunity to combine justice with revenge had opened up before us. Oh yes; in my fantasy, we were going to make the big city pay for the kind of moral outrages we had observed, the kind of callous and degenerate crimes that generally accompany wealth unregulated by ethical or physical restraints; and we were, at the same time, going to punish it for having used us so badly...." It is hard to resist a character with such eloquent charm and a story with such deep meaning, no matter what its time and place. MICHAEL CONNELLY'S 21st Harry Bosch novel, "The Wrong Side of Goodbye," will be published in November.
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.