Twenty-two years ago, Caleb Carr’s historical thriller The Alienist introduced readers to the criminal underworld of 19th-century New York, the prejudices against profiling of the time, and the systemic corruption that ran rampant in law and order. I loved The Alienist, and it pains me to say that Carr’s Surrender, New York, while dealing with the same general themes in a contemporary setting, offers little in the way of suspense and thrills.

I blame Carr’s narrator. Dr. Trajan Jones, a profiler who follows in the psychiatrist’s intellectual footsteps, is unlikable (and not in a good way). His dialogue is pedantic and his point of view is one of righteous indignation. Even his jokes with his partner, Dr. Michael Li, often fall short.

In the midst of an investigation into the murders of “disposable teenagers,” Jones muses: “My partner and I have always seen ourselves as servants of justice; in the case of the disposable teenagers, we had the always exquisite and rare opportunity to combine justice with vengeance. Oh yes: in my fantasy, we wanted to make the big city pay for the kind of moral transgressions we had witnessed, the kind of callous and depraved crimes that usually accompany wealth that is unregulated by ethical or physical constraints; and we wanted to punish it at the same time for treating us so badly.”

If that didn’t make you snore, then “Surrender, New York” might be for you.

Carole E. Barrowman is a writer and professor in Wisconsin.

Surrender, New York
By: Caleb Carr.
Publisher: Random House, 598 pages, $30.