While “Surrender, New York” (2017, 608 pages in hardback format) is a “who done it,” written in a style that is reminiscent of a century ago, Caleb Carr provides us with a good deal of the history of New York. However, it has nothing to do with the Big Apple “crying uncle.”
The novel is set in Surrender, NY, a small, sort of rural, town not far from the Vermont border. It is the home of Dr. L.T. (Trajan) Jones and his assistant Dr. Mike Li ever since they were “run out” of NYC. A point that Trajan would deny. They live in a converted airplane that they’ve fitted with the equipment used by criminal psychologists. The plane is located in Death’s Head Hollow on the farm of Trajan’s great aunt Clarissa Jones. And Trajan keeps his “African Hunting-Dog” in an enclosure surrounding a cave that he constructed for it. Of course, Trajan’s pet, Marcianna (who he calls his sister) is not really a dog. Like so many other assumptions that can be made as one reads the book, things are rarely what they seem to be.
When several teenagers — all of them “throw-away kids” who have been abandoned by their parents — start showing up dead, Trajan and Mike begin investigating. The police (and especially the powers above them) have announced that the deaths have been caused by a serial killer. But Trajan’s Sherlock-Holmes-type of analysis yields the conclusion that the children have all committed suicide, have been moved from the actual location of their demise, and have been posed for the benefit of the media.
The two scientists are soon joined by a 15-year-old named Lucas, a teenager with a highly analytical mind who is fascinated by the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes. Trajan and Mike take him on as a partner, partly to teach him their methods and partly to get his information about the area’s high-school culture. When Lucas encounters the work of Dr. Kreizler in the plane, he’s hooked. (Incidentally, Dr. Kreizler was the protagonist in two of Carr’s previous books, The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness.)
Lucas lives with his older sister Ambyr, who is blind and quite beautiful. She becomes enamored of Trajan, and they each have a disability. Trajan had cancer in a leg bone when he was a child, and the illness was not treated until it became necessary to remove the leg at his hip. Additionally, Lucas and Ambyr had been abandoned by their parents, and Ambyr was named as Lucas’ legal guardian. Their household also included Derek, Lucas’ best friend, who was also a ward of Ambyr’s.
As the plot advances, Trajan finds that he’s got two important tasks: first, to unravel the mystery of the suicides by the “throwaway kids” and second, to protect Ambyr, Lucas, and Derek from the “powers” in NYC, the people who he believes to be behind some sort of nefarious scheme that has resulted in the deaths of so many children.
Caleb Carr may not be for everyone. But if you loved Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books, then you don’t want to miss Caleb Carr’s work.
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Puede contactar a Jim Glynn en j_glynn@att.net.