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A review by monty_reads
Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr
3.0
Caleb Carr’s The Alienist knocked my socks off in the mid 90s, but I sadly don’t remember reading its follow-up, The Angel of Darkness. 20 years later, I suspect Surrender, NY is going to exist somewhere in between. Neither an unqualified success nor an outright failure, it’s just compelling enough to make me glad I read it.
Trajan Jones and Michael Li are forensic scientists exiled to upstate New York after ruffling too many police feathers in the Big Apple with their effective but unconventional methods. When a string of child deaths suddenly plagues their small community, Trajan and Li are conscripted by the local cops to figure out what’s going on.
With that as its basis, this should've been an easy one for Carr to knock out of the park, especially considering just how deft a job he did with turn-of-the-century forensics in The Alienist. And at first it's got all the morbid, oogy bits that originally turned me on to writers like Mo Hayder and Tana French (in her darker moments). The first body Trajan and Li investigate is that of a teenage girl strung up in a closet, her clothes folded neatly on the floor next to her. Was she murdered? Is it an accidental overdose made to look like a suicide? Or is it something altogether darker and more nefarious? (Hint: It's "c.") It doesn't take long for them to discover that this body is just the latest in a series of deaths that the local police have either covered up or been incapable of dealing with. As I said, all the pieces for a slam-bang thriller were in places.
The sad thing, though, it that Surrender, NY ends up being a decent mystery hobbled by, I guess, Carr's lack of impulse control. As characters, Trajan and Li are mainly a collection of self-consciously wacky quirks (Trajan owns a cheetah; he and Li work out of the body of a disused WWII-era airplane), and the dialogue is almost unforgivably clunky. This is especially true when Carr introduces Lucas, a teenager who becomes Trajan's spunky, profanity-obsessed young sidekick. Like a lot of Young Adult authors, Carr can't quite wrangle adolescent vernacular into anything approaching believable speech, so a lot of their exchanges sound like Cool Teenage Dialogue™ instead of authentic conversations between people we believe to be real. Similarly, Trajan's first-person narration tries to have it both ways by asking him to relay information that’s way more comprehensive than a single dude should have access to. For instance, for a 30something forensic scientist who is, seemingly by all accounts, kind of a walking disaster in the interpersonal relationship department, he has a weirdly comprehensive knowledge of people's clothing and other details. Take this description of another doctor:
That kind of thing is peppered throughout the book, and its purpose (I think) is to give the reader all the same information from a first person narrator that they'd typically get from an omniscient narrator. But it's so obviously tortured in places that I found myself repeatedly thinking, "There's no way Trajan would know that.
Surrender, NY really is a case of squandered potential. I liked it well enough, and the book really hums along when Trajan and Li dig into the details of the case, employing an inexorable logic that would make Holmes and Watson proud. But there were also long stretches where my mind wandered – Carr really loves having Trajan ruminate on the history of upstate New York, and it's in these stretches especially where narrative momentum grinds to a halt – and by the end I found it ultimately to be a book that just barely works, and does so in spite of its own impulses.
Trajan Jones and Michael Li are forensic scientists exiled to upstate New York after ruffling too many police feathers in the Big Apple with their effective but unconventional methods. When a string of child deaths suddenly plagues their small community, Trajan and Li are conscripted by the local cops to figure out what’s going on.
With that as its basis, this should've been an easy one for Carr to knock out of the park, especially considering just how deft a job he did with turn-of-the-century forensics in The Alienist. And at first it's got all the morbid, oogy bits that originally turned me on to writers like Mo Hayder and Tana French (in her darker moments). The first body Trajan and Li investigate is that of a teenage girl strung up in a closet, her clothes folded neatly on the floor next to her. Was she murdered? Is it an accidental overdose made to look like a suicide? Or is it something altogether darker and more nefarious? (Hint: It's "c.") It doesn't take long for them to discover that this body is just the latest in a series of deaths that the local police have either covered up or been incapable of dealing with. As I said, all the pieces for a slam-bang thriller were in places.
The sad thing, though, it that Surrender, NY ends up being a decent mystery hobbled by, I guess, Carr's lack of impulse control. As characters, Trajan and Li are mainly a collection of self-consciously wacky quirks (Trajan owns a cheetah; he and Li work out of the body of a disused WWII-era airplane), and the dialogue is almost unforgivably clunky. This is especially true when Carr introduces Lucas, a teenager who becomes Trajan's spunky, profanity-obsessed young sidekick. Like a lot of Young Adult authors, Carr can't quite wrangle adolescent vernacular into anything approaching believable speech, so a lot of their exchanges sound like Cool Teenage Dialogue™ instead of authentic conversations between people we believe to be real. Similarly, Trajan's first-person narration tries to have it both ways by asking him to relay information that’s way more comprehensive than a single dude should have access to. For instance, for a 30something forensic scientist who is, seemingly by all accounts, kind of a walking disaster in the interpersonal relationship department, he has a weirdly comprehensive knowledge of people's clothing and other details. Take this description of another doctor:
She had slung her simple black Bottega Veneta hobo bag on the back of her chair, and draped her similarly reserved but costly Alexander McQueen linen jacket over it . . . and it was easy to see very light perspiration forming through her sheer Anne Fontaine white shirt.
That kind of thing is peppered throughout the book, and its purpose (I think) is to give the reader all the same information from a first person narrator that they'd typically get from an omniscient narrator. But it's so obviously tortured in places that I found myself repeatedly thinking, "There's no way Trajan would know that.
Surrender, NY really is a case of squandered potential. I liked it well enough, and the book really hums along when Trajan and Li dig into the details of the case, employing an inexorable logic that would make Holmes and Watson proud. But there were also long stretches where my mind wandered – Carr really loves having Trajan ruminate on the history of upstate New York, and it's in these stretches especially where narrative momentum grinds to a halt – and by the end I found it ultimately to be a book that just barely works, and does so in spite of its own impulses.