I loved The Alienist and consider it to be one of my favorite reads. I've been more than a little disappointed with this sequel as it's traded the compelling movement and atmosphere of the first novel for what amounts to a very slow courtroom drama. It's been a while since I read The Alienist, but in my memory it was more active, both in story and voice. In The Angel of Darkness, the majority of the book is being told to us as a memory, and even scenes that could've served as compelling action points feel like expositional slog.

Aside from that, there are more than a few expositional coincidences that just seem more convenient than believable (the Roosevelt navy set piece at the end being the cherry on top). These unbelievable circumstances and hokey "the gang's all here" element often had me looking to see how much of the novel I had left.

That's not to say it's a BAD story, because there's a lot of thought provoking conjecture about morality and women's agency during the period. But Carr is a historian, and his story shines best when there's a true sense of belonging in the time period. The difference between the first book and its sequel is that The Alienist actively took place in New York City and that the city was its own character, living and breathing in a way The Angel of Darkness' rural country towns just can't equal. Perhaps they would've shined more had the story been an active occurrence versus a related memory, but I digress. The setting and its realness is what lent believability to the appearance of famous individuals like Teddy Roosevelt, who was police commissioner of New York City while the The Alienist's murders took place. In The Angel of Darkness, figures like Vanderbilt, Clarence Darrow, and Roosevelt himself seem shoehorned in for the novelty.

Finally, our antagonist in this novel just isn't as compelling, for a variety of reasons. First, she's revealed to us very early in the novel (through a series of the convenient coincidences I mentioned before: the baby's clothes at the museum, and then a sighting on a train), and this takes away any suspense or sense of urgency. Her motivations are also very muddy. As the reader we're kind of encouraged to shudder at her evil at the start of the novel, but then we're also repeatedly encouraged to sympathize with her because people are complex and our actions through adulthood are often linked to what we experienced as children. Unfortunately, by novel's end, we're not given compelling reason to sympathize aside from the fact that she's a woman in a man's world. We're shown pieces of what could've contributed to her motivations, but no true catalysts are given. We're left unsure of how sorry for her we're supposed to feel or how complex the motivations behind her murders are. Our protagonists themselves highlight this unsatisfying ending in exposition at the novel's end. In reality we don't always know why people do what they do, but the entire point of these novels is that Dr. Kriezler is a brilliant alienist who finds those motivations and shows the reader the grey in otherwise black and white situations. Failing to do so in this novel feels like a misstep on the author's part, particularly given this is only the second outing with Kriezler and gang.