Reminiscent of The Alienist, Stefanie Pintoff's debut novel features Det. Simon Ziele, formerly of the New York City police, who has moved to a small town in Westchester County after the death of his finacee in a tragic ferry accident. It is 1904. Ziele is pulled back to Manhattan whenthe brutal murder of a brilliant young female mathematics student in his sleepy town leads to the patient of a controversial criminologist and psychologist, Alastair Sinclair, a professor at Columbia University. Sarah Wingate's murder closely resembles the deranged fantasies of a man Sinclair has been studying, and who is now missing. Ziele, with the help of Sinclair and Sinclair's widowed daughter-in-law Isabella, weaves through turn of the century New York City, its back streets, brothels, rich and poor, powerful and not, trying to find the killer and bring him to justice.
The book was enjoyable read with a few quibbles; I found some of the exposition to be a bit obvious, as when Ziele launches into the history of the use of fingerprints, and found an occasional off-key note when language or situations seemed more modern than authentic for the time period (did they really have trash cans on the street in NYC in 1904?) It was also fairly easy to spot the killer half way through the book, even if, like me, you don't necessarily read mysteries to try to figure them out. However, the characters were interesting, with great potential for future stories, and Pintoff's knowledge of NYC at the turn of the century brings the city to life on the page.
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