The Alienist
The Alienist is a psychological thriller set in late 19th century New York City. In order to catch a serial killer, police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt puts together a secret forensic team that includes New York Times journalist John Moore, police secretary Sara Howard, the Detective Sergeants Isaacson, and the "alienist" himself, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. Within the pages of this book, the reader follows this unlikely team in an investigation that takes them from the poorest neighbourhoods of the Lower East Side to the wealthiest mansions of Fifth Avenue.
Timeline and Series of Events
March 3, 1896: John Moore, Dr Laszlo Kreizler, and police commisioner Theodore Roosevelt view the body of Georgio "Gloria" Santorelli atop the western anchor of the Williamsburg Bridge. In a meeting later in the morning at 300 Mulberry street, they decide to launch a secret investigation into the Santorelli murder and others that have been like it recently. Laszlo and John are promised the help of two Detectives along with a police liaison, who will keep Roosevelt up to date on the investigation as his involvement cannot be made public. Kreizler and Moore then spend the next few days organising their work and private lives so they will be able to devote most of their time working on the case.
March 5, 1896: John and Kreizler meet the Detective Sergeants Isaacsons (Marcus and Lucius). To assess their abilities, Kreizler gets them to perform a post-mortem in the operating theatre at the Kreizler Institute on the Zweig children who were murdered several years ago in the same style as Georgio Santorelli. Leaving Laszlo with the Isaacsons, Mr Moore and Sara Howard, an old friend and police secretary, interview Mrs. Santorelli at her tenement flat. They find out that unknown priests have been to pay out the Santorelli family earlier in the day. Upon leaving the flat, the pair are then almost attacked by two thugs who turn out to be ex-cops. Later in the evening, John and Kreizler spend the evening at the opera with Sara, who has coincidentally turned out to be their police liaison, before having dinner at Delmonico's with the Isaacson brothers to review their post-mortem findings. After the dinner, John decides to do some private investigating of his own by visiting the brothel where Santorelli performed his trade. Unfortunately, he is drugged and would have been killed if not for Stevie Taggert, Kreizler's ward, stepping in and saving him.
March 7, 1896: John wakes up from his drug-induced sleep at 808 Broadway, the team's new headquarters. He and Kreizler then perform an evaluation of a man who recently murdered another child but who proves unrelated to the case. Meanwhile, the Isaacson brothers perform further post-mortems of two other boys who were killed in the same way as Santorelli and the Zweig children. In the afternoon, the group have their first official meeting at 808 Broadway, where Kreizler provides the team with a large selection of psychology books and articles so they can begin to understand the psychological state of the killer.
March 8 - April 2, 1896: During this time, the team works on developing their own psychology knowledge while developing theories about the killer. They also accompany Kreizler on numerous evaluations of murderers that may help in their case.
April 3, 1896: In the early hours of the morning, there is another murder of a boy at Castle Garden, Battery Park. The team perform a post-mortem of the boy on location and investigate possible escape roots that the murderer may have used. Their work is cut short, however, as a mob develops outside the crime scene and the group are forced to escape. They return to 808 Broadway to discuss their findings before they return home to get some sleep. When they arrive at 808 Broadway, they find Mary Palmer (Kreizler's housekeeper) making breakfast for them and Kreizler gets very angry at her. John believes that Laszlo has been hard on her and grows even more confused when Sara enlightens him that Mary is in love with Kreizler.
April 4, 1896: Sara and Laszlo travel outside the city to perform an evaluation and John, taking this as evidence that the pair are somehow romantically involved, decides to take Mary out for the day as he hypothesizes that if she is really in love with Kreizler then she must be feeling very depressed indeed. He later brings her home to find that Laszlo has arrived back at 283 East Seventeenth street early after leaving Sara at the evaluation to come back on her own. To further add to John's confusion, he seems happy that Mary has had a day out. John then decides to stop trying to figure out his friend's love life and he meets up with Marcus to visit the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, the workplace of the boy who was murdered the previous night. There they find out that the boy's name was Ali "Fatima" ibn-Ghazi. They also meet a friend of the boy's, named Joseph, who gives them further information about Ali. Joseph reminds John of his younger brother and he takes it upon himself to make sure that Joseph stays safe while the killer is on the loose.
April 5, 1896: The team meet at 808 Broadway and Lucius informs them that the ibn-Ghazi family have also been visited by priests and paid out.
Throughout April: The team try to figure out the significance of the dates the boys were killed as well as theorizing about the role that the mystery priests were playing in the murders. They also scan newspapers and accompany Kreizler to more evaluations.
End of April: Mrs. Santorelli is sent a letter from the killer which is handed onto the investigative team. It provides a lot of useful information about the killer not only though its content but also through the killer's handwriting. Subsequently, the team stay at 808 Broadway for a long meeting where they try to make sense of the letter but the meeting ends rather abruptly when a tired, impatient Kreizler rejects Sara's idea of a female actively being involved in the killer's childhood. Sara is angry with this response and the meeting ends early with Sara walking out.
First Week Of May: Kreizler spends most of his time in the first week of May interviewing abusive men as well as the wifes and children who have suffered at their hands. Meanwhile, the other members of the team continue to learn more about the priests and their possible connection to the killer by visiting various church organizations. They also organise meetings with a bishop of the Episcopal church and the Archbishop of the Catholic church.
Second Week Of May: Kreizler, surprisingly, asks John to take a train to Sing Sing Prison to visit Jesse Pomeroy, a serial killer whose primary influence in his childhood was a woman. Laszlo then confides in John that during the previous week he spent a considerable time speaking with his friend and fellow psychologist, Dr. Adolf Meyer, about the case. To Kreizler's disappointment, Meyer had agreed with Sara's suggestion of a woman being involved in the killer's childhood and had reminded Kreizler of Jesse Pomeroy's case. The visit to Sing Sing confirms Meyer and Sara's view, while Kreizler grows angry at himself for falling victim to the "psychologist's fallacy". Later that evening, Kreizler and John meet up with Sara where Laszlo apologises for his behaviour and to asks for her opinion on the female involved in the killer's past. Sara and John then travel back to Gramercy Park together where Sara reveals to John why Kreizler was so opposed to a female playing an active role in the killer's past. By searching through old newspapers and police reports, she has found out that Kreizler himself had been physically abused by his father as a child, while his mother played a passive role. Although this explains Laszlo's recent behaviour, both agree never reveal this information to anyone and they burn Sara's evidence.
May 9, 1896: The team decide that on the Ascension Day they will watch over the different disorderly houses from the rooftops. Their reasoning is that if the killer is choosing religious holidays to kill his victims and if he is traveling via rooftops, then they would have a good chance of at least seeing him or, better yet, intercepting him.
May 14, 1896: The team station themselves on the rooftops of five disorderly houses but the killer doesn't show up. They decided to repeat the exercise on Pentecost, set for eleven days later.
May 15 - May 24, 1896: In the time between Ascension and Pentecost, the team get feedback from asylums around the country with information on patients that fit the profile they have developed of the killer. They receive one from St. Elizabeth's asylum which proves especially useful, and Kreizler decides that a trip to Washington D.C. is in order. However, due to their pending exercise for manning the disorderly house rooftops on Pentecost, the trip is postponed until after May 25.
May 25, 1896: The team once again station themselves at the disorderly houses but this time, the killer arrives. The exercise doesn't prove very useful though because Cyrus Montrose, being the only person present on the rooftop the killer arrives at, gets attacked. The only other investigators who see the killer are Stevie and John but they don't notice anything distinguishing as they are only able to view the back of the killer. In addition to this unfortunate turn of events, the team soon find out that the killer had gone elsewhere to perform his killing of another young boy named Ernst Lohmann. Later in the morning, the team perform a post-mortem on Lohmann in which they find out that the killer has taken his mutilations to a new extreme; he has removed the boy's heart. From the mortuary, John and Kreizler are unexpectedly picked up by Paul Kelly, a gang leader, who informs them that he is aware of their investigation and that he has been the person rousing much of the civil unrest (i.e., mobs) surrounding the murders. After this disconcerting conversation with Paul Kelly, John and Laszlo decide to visit the Museum of Natural History and get help from Kreizler's friend Franz Boas, a famous anthropologist, to see if he can help in explaining the mutilations found on the victims bodies. One of Boas's students is able to confirm that the mutilations are consistent with those by the Dakota and Sioux tribes, except they would never do such a thing to a child.
John and Kreizler then return to 808 Broadway with this information and to finalize their trip to Washington D.C.. At this meeting, the team decide that while Kreizler and John are in Washington, the Isaacson brothers will travel to Deadwood, South Dakota, and then onto the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation and Agency to gain more information about the possible Indian connection. Sara, meanwhile, will stay behind in New York to coordinate. At the conclusion of the meeting, Laszlo and John visit Cyrus in hospital but upon leaving, they are abducted by Connor, an ex-cop, who performs the task with the help of the thugs that had attacked Sara and John two months earlier at the Santorellis' flat. They are taken to 219 Madison Avenue for a meeting with Bishop Potter, Archbishop Corrigan, two other priests, Anthony Comstock, ex-Inspector Thomas Byrnes, and John Pierpont Morgan. Suddenly, the presence of the priests and the payouts that the victim's families had received all make sense. The priests, Bishop Potter, Archbishop Corrigan, Byrnes, and Comstock have all been trying to put an end to the investigation primarily for financial and civil reasons. It is also revealed that the involvement of Connor's thugs in attacking members of the team is due to orders by Byrnes to put a stop to the investigation. After some convincing on Kreizler's part, however, John Pierpont Morgan becomes open to the idea of the investigation and decides to allow Laszlo and the team to continue on.
May 26, 1896: The Isaacson brothers leave for Deadwood, South Dakota and Kreizler and John leave for Washington D.C. by train.
May 27 - May 29, 1896: John spends his time at the Patent Office researching violent incidents between settlers and Sioux tribes. Kreizler, meanwhile, spends his time at the St. Elizabeth's Hospital researching the hospital records. After days of searching, Laszlo manages to make a promising find with information about a soldier, named John Beecham, who had been hospitalized and seems to fit the killer's profile almost perfectly. Despite this positive find, he is unable to obtain any information about John Beecham's childhood. Coinciding with this discovery, John comes across a file featuring a bizarre set of murders that occurred in New Paltz in which Victor Dury and his wife were killed by Indians and their son, Japheth Dury, was kidnapped by the attackers. After several phone calls to Sara and Franz Boas's students to verify information provided in the reports, John and Kreizler believe that investigating the Dury murders may offer the best path forward. Due to advice from the Isaacson brothers, who are in Fort Yates, Kreizler and John decide to travel to Newton, Massachusetts to interview the only remaining Dury family member, Japheth's older brother, named Adam.
May 30, 1896: Kreizler and John return to New York before heading to Newton. Sara, meanwhile, decides to travel to New Paltz to continue research into the Dury murders. After a morning in New York coordinating their efforts, each head to their various destinations. Once Kreizler and John arrive at Newton, they interview Adam Dury and find a remarkable connection. Japheth Dury had been a sadistic child with a mother who resented her life and took it out on her son. Additionally, he had been sexually assulted in his childhood by a farmhand called George Beecham. It is now clear that Japheth's childhood fits perfectly with the profile of the killer, and John and Kreizler feel it can now be assumed that Japheth Dury was not kidnapped at all. Rather, that he was the murderer of his parents and that he had taken on the name of his own abuser when he re-started his new life. Given this information, Laszlo and John leave to return to New York immediately but are attacked by Connor's thugs once again, indicating that despite Morgan's support, adversaries such as Comstock and Byrnes are still trying to stop the team. Although they get away, there is another interesting turn of events. Due to something Kreizler says to John when he feels he is going to die (as he is being attacked), on the journey home he eventually admits that he is in love with Mary and is planning to enter a relationship with her.
May 31, 1896: The pair arrive home early on Sunday morning to hear that in their absence, Kreizler's house was the subject of a home invasion by Connor, who was attempting to track down the Doctor's location. Tragically, as a result of this invasion, Mary broke her neck and died during the attack. The other members of the house, Stevie and Cyrus, are also badly injured but are fortunately still alive. Not surprisingly, Kreizler leaves the investigation out of grief and it is now up to John, Sara, and the Isaacsons to catch the killer. Awaiting the Isaacsons return from their trip, Sara and John spend the following days finalizing their theories.
June 3, 1896: In the evening on Wednesday, John and Sara visit Roosevelt to explain everything that has happened. Following this, Roosevelt indicates that he would like to play a more active role in the team given that another important religous holiday is approaching and Beecham (aka Dury) may be panning another murder. Later that night, the Isaacsons arrive back from their assignment and upon meeting up with Sara and John, they relay their findings. The team then decide they will have another meeting the next day to determine their course of action.
June 4, 1896: The team decide that they will try to gain even more information about the killer so that, at minimum, they will have a better idea of where he is planning to strike next. They believe that finding him via his present profession seems the most obvious choice and so through further theorizing, they narrow this down to rooftop workers who would have some contact with children. This reduces the possibilities further to charity and religious organization workers. They decide to start their individual searches the next day.
June 5 -June 16, 1896: It is frustrating search and none of the team members make much progress. None of the organizations they visit have any records of their killer or a man fitting his description. Finally, on June 15, Sara and John have a flash of inspiration and decide to look into the United States Bureau of Census where they learn that Beecham has worked as an enumerator. From there, they find one of his previous addresses which they then visit. The woman who owns the property is still trying to rent Beecham's old room and, acting as prospective tenants, John and Sara are able to look around. As if to confirm that they are on the scent, John discovers that Beecham had mutilated and killed one of the woman's cats and hidden it in his old bedroom. Following this, they return to 808 Broadway where they meet with the Isaacson brothers and relay their findings. Over the night, the team theorize that Beecham is now working as either a bill collector or a process server. They then spend most of June 16 compiling a list of these organizations to start visiting on June 17.
June 17 - June 18, 1896: All of the team work throughout Wednesday and Thursday but none of them make any progress until late on Thursday evening when Sara picks up a scent. She is able to find an Accounts Settled firm where it is discovered that Beecham has been working as a debt collector. Fortunately, the address the firm provides for Beecham is very recent and the entire team make their way to the location to either make an arrest or examine his property if he isn't home. When they arrive, they find that the flat has been vacant for the past few days but despite this, Beecham did leave behind some tantalizing clues as to where he is going to make his next murder. These clues include a jar of eye balls from his victims, a map of the water system in New York, and box containing the remnants of a human heart. John and Sara then return to 808 Broadway where they make a gruesome discovery. In a large sack outside the door to the headquarters, they find the murdered body of John's young friend, Joseph.
June 19, 1896: John stays at the morgue while Joseph has a post-mortem. Understandably, John is distraught that his warnings to Joseph earlier in the investigation had not kept him safe. After the post-mortem, Kreizler comes by the morgue and picks up John to take him to breakfast. At breakfast Laszlo is sympathetic to John and also tells him that he would be willing to re-join the investigation after the opera on Sunday evening, when it is assumed Beecham will next strike.
June 21 - June 22, 1896: Roosevelt visits 808 Broadway and the team, minus Kreizler, make plans for their ambush of Beecham that evening. They select the High Bridge Tower as the most likely place that he will take his victim. In the evening, at Kreizler's request, John attends the opera with him after which point Kreizler had promised to attend the next assumed scene of the crime with the rest of the team. However, half-way through the opera, Kreizler pulls John away from the opera and takes him to a completely different location to what the team hypothesized, the Croton Reservoir. True to Kreizler's theory, however, they find that Beecham has take his victim here. Laszlo and John are then almost killed by Beecham but thanks to the fact that Kreizler had been getting tailed in the past few months by Connor's men, they are saved. However, this presents a new danger in that Connor will gladly kill Kreizler and John in addition to Beecham, but Kreizler had already accounted for this and had hired Jack McManus, one of Paul Kelly's men, as his protector who had stayed hidden until this point. All in a flurry, Connor and his men are bound by Jack McManus and left for Roosevelt to deal with when it is assumed he will come to the realization that High Bridge Tower is the wrong location. Kreizler then spends several minutes talking to Beecham, who is now fearful for his own life, but this talk is cut short. Connor manages to regain consciousness and escape from his bindings, after which he shoots Beecham. Shortly afterwards, all other members of the investigative team arrive at the reservoir after they realized that it was where John and Kreizler had gone. The other team members are understandably upset with what has happened but forgive Kreizler for being secretive. On the Monday, Kreizler and Lucius perform a post-mortem on Beecham but they find no physical brain degeneration and this helps to confirm Kreizler's theory of context.
June 23, 1896: The team have one final dinner at Delmonico's to conclude the affair. But, little do they know that it won't be long until they are to be presented with their next group investigation...