BOOKS: A Case for Sherlock Freud

Caleb Carr's shrewd and amiable entertainment The Alienist (Random House; 496 pages; $22) is a good psychological thriller, but what makes it exceptional is that it is also a remarkable time-machine voyage. Carr sets us down in New York City -- yes, there's the American Museum of Natural History right where it belongs, at 79th and Central Park West -- but the date is 1896, a year poised more delicately than most between past and future. Horses still pull cabs, but telephones are fairly common. New York is still a rowdy port city, but finance has replaced shipping as the principal source of its power. Not everything is in transition, though: the poor in 1896, as in 1994, are abused, degraded and clucked over (they live like animals in those awful tenements), and police corruption alarms honest citizens.

There is one other element recognizable from our own time: a serial killer is at work. He (she, perhaps?) is a slasher who abducts and mutilates boy prostitutes and escapes over rooftops. One observer proposes the startling notion that a misty swirl of radical, unsettling new theories about the workings of the human mind could be used by detectives to create a / psychological profile of the murderer. The man who offers this theory is an alienist (people who commit bizarre acts are said to be alienated from their right minds), Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, once a student of William James at Harvard. His belief is that childhood experiences are more important than inherited tendencies in ordering behavior, and this psychological determinism, an offense to the ideal of free will, is widely unpopular with the clergy, the mayor and other conventional thinkers. But Theodore Roosevelt, the new police commissioner, is enthusiastic, and on the sly he backs an investigation.

Kreizler, an intellectual autocrat of almost Sherlockian self-assurance, takes up the pursuit with a somewhat addlepated New York Times reporter named Moore; his pal Sara, a gun-packing early feminist with bumptious ambitions to be a police officer; and a pair of brothers named Isaacson, who are scientifically up-to-date detectives. From the dimmest of clues, this team deduces a shape in the fog: an intelligent, physically powerful, driven individual who was abused sexually as a child but raised in a strictly religious family. The hunt is on, with much clambering over rooftops, chasing about in cabs and calashes, and long, meditative dinners at Delmonico's. Soon (as whodunit tradition dictates) the investigators themselves are being hunted -- by rogue cops and underworld enforcers; by ambiguous religious operatives representing powers and principalities with no interest in solving the crimes; and, it becomes horribly clear, by the same night stalker they themselves are trying to capture. And at about this time, Moore begins to have doubts: Are Kreizler's own exceedingly peculiar actions explainable by any but the darkest motives?