Book review: 'Angel of Darkness' by Caleb Carr

Tuesday, September 30, 1997

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, N.Y. Times News Service

'THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS,' by Caleb Carr; illustrated; 629 pages; Random House; $25.95.

Sequels usually don't work, but in "The Angel of Darkness," Caleb Carr has written at least as winning a historical thriller as his best seller "The Alienist."

Once again, he has created a turn-of-the-century New York City that feels as authentic as a fading tintype.

Through this city hurtle the appealing people we got to know in the previous novel: Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the brooding alienist, or expert on mental pathologies (minds that are alienated from themselves); Cyrus Montrose, his indomitable servant; John Schuyler Moore, the high-living crime reporter for The New York Times; Lucius and Marcus Isaacson, the squabbling detective sergeants in the New York Police Department, and feisty Sara Howard, now a private investigator on her own.

They are joined by a vivid gallery of actual historical figures, among them Albert Pinkham Ryder, the painter; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the feminist, and Clarence Darrow, the trial lawyer. Their adventures are described by a fictional former street urchin, Stevie Taggert, whose uneducated yet colorful vernacular is an improvement on the somewhat musty Victorian prose of "The Alienist."

Best of all, the theme of "The Angel of Darkness" is both historically accurate and contemporary, concerning as it does the social pressure on women to be mothers and what happens to their psyches when they lack the instinct to nurture.

The story begins when Sara Howard receives a desperate visit from Senora Isabella Linares, the wife of the secretary to the Spanish consul. She tells Sara that her 14-month-old baby, Ana, has been kidnapped. To complicate matters, Senora Linares' husband has severely beaten her to prevent her from going to the police for help. And she has seen her baby in the arms of a white American woman riding on a train.

Is the kidnapping a random criminal act, or is it somehow connected to the threat of war between the United States and Spain? The answer, everyone agrees, lies in identifying the mysterious woman. To do this, Kreizler comes up with the original idea of having a portraitist recommended by Albert Pinkham Ryder render Senora Linares' description of the woman.

With the result, one Elspeth Hunter, a woman with brilliantly golden eyes, is identified. She turns out to have been a nurse at the New York Lying-In Hospital who left under suspicion of having suffocated several babies. Why would she both murder children and want one badly enough to kidnap Ana Linares?

"Something connects the two sides of the character," Kreizler speculates, "the two faces of the coin. We don't know what that connecting element is yet, but the connection exists. So that what we are faced with is not an inconsistency so much as a troubled unity. Aspects of a condition - related stages of a single process."

To understand the process better, they call on Mrs. Hunter, who acts by turns seductive and furious. But they can get nothing out of her nor find any trace of Ana Linares in her home at 39 Bethune St. What's more, she turns out to have an alternate life as Libby Hatch, the girlfriend of the leader of one of New York City's most violent gangs, which makes her extremely dangerous as well as bafflingly mysterious.

The only solution is to dig into her background. "The past is our way in - we must follow it," the alienist pronounces. Which leads them to a little town near Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where they discover signs of more murders and a little girl so traumatized by something she has seen that she can no longer speak. When Kreizler finishes treating her, she will be the key witness in the murder trial that leads to the rousing climax of "The Angel of Darkness."

The novel is far from perfect. Stevie Taggert, the narrator, is far too garrulous; his words could have been cut by a fourth. Occasional anachronisms show up in his narrative, like "hopefully," which in the sense of "it is to be hoped" did not appear in American speech until the 1930s, and "pursue such private, perverse agendas."

And he has an annoying habit of promising too much about the episodes of his story before he relates them, which means that their terror, excitement or whatever always falls short of the promises.

More seriously, the character of the suspect in the kidnapping and murder, Elspeth Hunter/Libby Hatch, never quite comes into clear enough focus to make her alive on the page. Unlike all the other characters, she remains Kreizler's contradictory set of hypotheses.

Still, she is an extremely intriguing set of hypotheses, who with the help of Carr's clever plotting keeps outwitting Kreizler and his intrepid friends.

And so, as the alienist keeps ruminating on human behavior and Detective Sergeant Isaacson keeps pioneering in the development of criminal evidence and Stevie Taggert keeps running the most dangerous errands ... the reader keeps right on turning the pages.