'The Alienist II'

摘要

You can't say that caleb carr isn't clever. In his last novel, the surprise best seller "The Alienist" (1.5 million copies sold), he paired a psychologist and a newspaper reporter against a diabolical serial killer, but he took the shopworn curse off his tale by setting it in 1896. The villain of his ktest 19th-century mystery-thriller, The Angel of Darkness (629 pages. Random House. $25.95), is one of those tabloid-fodder moms who kill their children. The trouble with making such a creature the murderer in a novel, as Carr shrewdly discerns, is that women like this appall us but don't scare us. Serial killers are scary because they could be anywhere, bumping off anybody. Killer moms work at home; unless it's your mom, no sweat. So Carr hooks his fictional murderer up with a brutal New York street gang. He has her kidnapping and murdering other children, then murdering husbands, policemen, lawyers and just about anyone else who ticks her off. But the cleverest thing Carr has done is to successfully rewrite his last book while making it just different enough to ward off any charge that he's plagiarized himself.