A review by bretts_book_stack
Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr

2.0

Ultimately, what a disappointment! I loved his first two books so much, and reading that this was even partially connected to 'The Alienist' I was really interested in it. However, the association is slim at best beginning and ending with Trajan Jones as a modern day criminal psychologist who has extensively studied the work of Dr Laszlo Kreisler, the Alienist from Carr's first book. He's paired with a wisecracking partner named Mike Li, who seems vaguely like the Vince Masuka character from "dexter' in temperament. Therein was the central problem of this book for me; Everything felt like a rehash of something else. Trajan feels like he might as well have been transported from the nineteenth century in his bearing and dialogue, while he's surrounded by a group of contemporary contemporaries who swear alot and feel like they're in another story as well as another century. I'm also hardly ever this person, but I figured out a major plot reveal early enough that when it finally got revealed it just colored the last one hundred pages of the book as weakly constructed as the CSI shows Trajan rails about endlessly. That became my other beef. I really was patient for the first half with the long explanations and the minutiae regarding their jobs, but that said, there's a reason it took me nearly ten days to finish this thing. It isn't that compelling.