Caleb Carr

(2016) Revisit to this author for the first time in 14 years. Something about the fact that he had a new book made me want to try him again. Not disappointed as the story of 2 partners who provide forensic consulting and teach classes online unfolds. They are skeptics and debunkers of CSI type of investigations as they think the science has been perverted. Here they get involved in cases of deaths of ?throwaway children? which are all considered suicides but are symptoms of a much deeper crime of trafficking in kids abandoned by parents and the system. Very good.KIRKUS REVIEWCarr (The Legend of Broken, 2012, etc.) returns with a curious whodunit that weds leisurely 19th-century storytelling with 21st-century unpleasantness.It's not a demand for the Big Apple to give up to the Wicked Witch. Instead, the title of Carr's new novel, full of echoes of and allusions to its predecessors, is also the name of an upstate town where NYPD psychologist Trajan Jones finds himself in exile, having crossed the brass one time too many. Now, with partner Mike Li, he's teaching criminology online, a fact that lands him new connections¥including a student who's caught up in a whole mess of dark secrets surrounding the forest-shrouded burg. Complicating the story are the local gendarmes, a young blind woman whoÂ¥this being a genre novel, after allÂ¥allows a good long glimpse at what's underneath her robe, andÂ¥this being a Carr novel, full of quirks all its ownÂ¥a pet cheetah. Bringing Up Baby it's not, though a sordid twist involving what Carr euphemistically calls ?illegal adoption? figures. It takes a good long while for the plot to unfold and the bad guys to emerge, as is the way of most police investigationsÂ¥and of Carr's Trollope-an style, long on atmospherics and short of car chases and their moral equivalents. And, as always, Carr takes an encyclopedic, parenthetical, village-explainer approach that some readers, used to swifter narratives, might not wholly endorse; along the way, we learn, for example, of the tensions between medical examiners and coroners, who are not the same thing, and why Albany is the capital of New York, for better or worse. Yet Carr's story poses an utterly modern question: for a career-minded politico, which is worse, a child-neglect scandal or a serial killer on the loose? We get to see both at work, including some nicely nasty mayhem: ?He'd been hit in the center of the back, the shot shattering his spine and, I found when I turned him over, taking away part of his chest.?Carr's many fans will find this well worth the wait.Pub Date: Aug. 23rd, 2016ISBN: 978-0-679-45569-1Page count: 624ppPublisher: Random HouseReview Posted Online: May 30th, 2016Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15th, 2016… (altro)