SOURCE: "New York Was a Heck of a Town," in The New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1994, p. 19.

[Dobyns is an American poet, novelist, and critic. In the following mixed review, he faults the narrative voice of The Alienist as inappropriate.]

The word "light"—often spelled "lite"—has come to signify a laudable quality in our society: light beer, light cigarettes, light hot dogs. As a qualifier for "reading," however, "light" has been replaced by the word "page-turner." One may read at a breakneck pace in order to discover what happens, or one may be turning the pages faster in a frantic search for substance. The Alienist, by the historian Caleb Carr, fits neatly into both categories.

Told by a turn-of-the-century New York Times reporter, John Schuyler Moore, the novel deals with the gruesome murders of a number of boy prostitutes in Manhattan in 1896. Alienist, a note tells...