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Surrender, New York - Hardcover

Carr, Caleb

 
9780679455691: Surrender, New York
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0679455698 ISBN 13: 9780679455691
Verlag: RANDOM HOUSE, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Imaginative and fulfilling . . . an addictive contemporary crime procedural.”—Michael Connelly, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, returns with a contemporary, edge-of-your-seat thriller featuring the brilliant but unconventional criminal psychologist Dr. Trajan Jones.

In the small town of Surrender in upstate New York, Dr. Jones, a psychological profiler, and Dr. Michael Li, a trace evidence expert, teach online courses in profiling and forensic science from Jones’s family farm. Once famed advisors to the New York City Police Department, Trajan and Li now work in exile, having made enemies of those in power. Protected only by farmhands and Jones’s unusual “pet,” the outcast pair is unexpectedly called in to consult on a disturbing case.

In rural Burgoyne County, a pattern of strange deaths has emerged: adolescent boys and girls are found murdered in gruesome fashion. Senior law enforcement officials are quick to blame a serial killer, yet their efforts to apprehend this criminal are peculiarly ineffective.

Jones and Li soon discover that the victims are all “throwaway children,” a new state classification of young people who are neither orphans, runaways, nor homeless, but who are abandoned by their families and left to fend for themselves. Two of these throwaways, Lucas Kurtz and his older sister, Ambyr, cross paths with Jones and Li, offering information that could blow the case wide open.

As the stakes grow higher, Jones and Li must not only unravel the mystery of how the throwaways died but also defend themselves and the Kurtz siblings against shadowy agents who don’t want the truth to get out. Jones believes the real story leads back to the city where both he and Dr. Kreizler did their greatest work. But will Jones and Li be able to trace the case to New York before they fall victim to the murderous forces that stalk them?

Tautly paced and richly researched, Surrender, New York brings to life the grim underbelly of a prosperous nation—and those most vulnerable to its failings. This brilliant novel marks another milestone in Caleb Carr’s triumphant literary suspense career.

Praise for Surrender, New York

“[A] page-turning thriller . . . For maximum enjoyment: surrender, reader.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Every word of fiction Carr has produced seems to have been written in either direct or indirect conversation with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. . . .  [Surrender, New York] allows Carr to deploy his indisputable gift for the gothic and the macabre, and the pursuit is suspenseful and believable.”—USA Today

“[A] long-awaited return.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“[A] superb mystery . . . [that moves] at a swift and often terrifying pace. As in The Alienist, Carr triumphs at every twist and turn.”—Providence Journal

“Edgar Allan Poe would have understood this book and hailed it a masterpiece. . . . A terrific story with a great setting and a very modern social message.”—The Globe and Mail

“[An] engrossing mystery.”—Library Journal

“A compulsive read . . . Carr once again delivers a high-stakes thriller featuring a new band of clever, determined outcasts.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Carr’s many fans will find this well worth the wait.”—Kirkus Reviews

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caleb Carr is the critically acclaimed author of The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, The Lessons of Terror, Killing Time, The Devil Soldier, The Italian Secretary, and The Legend of Broken. He has taught military history at Bard College, and worked extensively in film, television, and the theater. His military and political writings have appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals, among them The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in upstate New York.

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Part One

The Curse of Knowledge

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. . . . ​Reversing the process is as difficult as un-ringing a bell. You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them. —Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick

For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. —Ecclesiastes 1:18

Chapter One

“You Cannot Escape It, in This Country”

{i.}

The case did not so much burst upon as creep over Burgoyne County, New York, just as the sickness that underlay it only took root in the region slowly, insidiously, and long before the first body was found. My own initial indication that at least one crime of an unusual and quite probably violent nature had been committed came in the form of a visit from Deputy Sheriff Pete Steinbrecher, in early July of that summer. I was then living, as I had been for about five years, at Shiloh, a dairy farm belonging to my spinster great-aunt, Miss Clarissa Jones. Shiloh is centered on a large Italianate farmhouse that is the sole residence in Death’s Head Hollow, one of a half-dozen valleys that lead down from the high ground of the northern Taconic Mountains into the small town of Surrender.

Despite my having spent some seven or eight years working as a criminal psychologist (primarily with the New York City Police Department) prior to relocating to the pastoral severity of the Taconics, I had only occasionally interacted with what passes for local law enforcement during my time up north. Due to severe budget cuts at every level of government, there was and remains precious little law in Burgoyne County: communities like Surrender long ago lost their town constabularies, as well as their county sheriff’s substations, and what little regular patrolling the latter department can still do is focused primarily on the county seat of Fraser. The residents of the many small communities in the region have thus been left to see to their own safety, which they are happy to do: for Burgoyne County is gun country, and only in cases involving extreme disturbances are either the sheriff’s office in Fraser or the New York State Police contacted.

For these and other reasons, my main criminological efforts since relocating to my great-aunt’s farm (where I’d spent nearly every weekend and summer vacation as a boy) had been less applied than academic: I’d been establishing an online course of study in various controversial aspects of forensic science under the aegis of the State University of New York at Albany. That institution’s first-rate School of Criminal Justice had long offered a range of classes in forensics, both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels; but its senior faculty and officials, wisely taking into account the scandals that have rocked both federal and regional crime laboratories as well as the field of forensic science generally during the last twenty years, had decided, just before my own relocation to their area, to offer complementary courses that would explore the well-documented weaknesses of forensics. Mine had been one of the most outspoken voices attempting to expose those weaknesses; and because my work (and the methods that underlay them) had led to a series of widely publicized conflicts with the NYPD’s crime lab that had ultimately made me persona non grata in the metropolis where I was born, I was not altogether surprised, but was entirely grateful, when SUNY-Albany offered me the chance to help structure their balancing course of study.

Partnering with my closest co-worker in New York, Mike Li—an expert in trace and DNA evidence who had spent years vociferously pointing out the widespread and often fatal flaws that marred the gathering, handling, and courtroom use of such evidence—I gladly accepted the university’s offer, provided Mike’s and my own courses could be taught online. (The lingering effects of a childhood bout with osteosarcoma on my left femur and pelvis had recently made extended travel, even the fifty miles or so to Albany and back, increasingly difficult for me.) The administrators of the School of Criminal Justice, already anxious to expand their presence in the burgeoning world of online teaching, had readily agreed to this condition; and soon Mike and I had established a virtual lecture hall inside a rickety old airplane hangar that sat on a hill behind two large green barns built in the mid-nineteenth century that were the centerpieces of the farm that my great-aunt oversaw with an iron will.

To be more precise, Mike and I had built our Skype-operated classroom inside the fuselage of a pre–World War II Junkers JU-52/3m, a classic German civilian aircraft, the care and maintenance of which had been the passion of my great-aunt’s father. After piloting it from Germany to Senegal in 1935 via a circuitous European and North African route, the old lunatic had shipped the plane to Brazil and flown it north: an adventure that was apparently as colorful—and expensive—as it sounds. But the tri-engine beast was now immobile, the ghostly occupant of nearly every inch of the large hangar; and inside it Mike and I worked to disabuse our students, first, of the widely accepted idea that forensics (not only trace and DNA collection, but such far older practices as fingerprinting and ballistics, as well) were the “gold standard” of evidentiary analysis and courtroom argument and, second, of the equally popular and pernicious notion that forensics had made criminal psychology, and especially profiling, somehow obsolete.

On the afternoon in question, I had just given a long and fairly impassioned summer term lecture explaining precisely how damaging this last set of beliefs had become, asking that my students—representatives of the coming generation of criminal investigators—restore both psychology and profiling to the positions of respect that they had largely lost when the purportedly more precise areas of forensics had begun to monopolize criminal investigation in the early 1990s. Stepping away from the half-dozen large video monitors that dominated the interior of the JU-52 when I was finally finished, I then descended slowly into the hangar via a set of steel steps that my great-grandfather had built up and over the starboard wing of the plane to the forward hatch, and went outside to lean on my cane and smoke a cigarette. From there, I caught sight of Pete Steinbrecher’s patrol car moving quickly up the hollow, lights flashing but siren mute: Pete was well enough acquainted with both Shiloh and my diminutive yet fiery great-aunt to know that the sound of the siren would bring Clarissa swiftly from the farmhouse, to which she would not return until she had delivered a stern lecture to the deputy on the effects of such sounds on dairy cattle. For this and other reasons, Pete did not brave the hollow on minor errands—indeed, his presence almost certainly indicated just one thing:

“Mike,” I called, stepping back toward the great maw that was the open hangar door, “Pete Steinbrecher’s on his way up.” I could hear Mike cut short his preparations for a seminar as I added flatly, “Looks like someone’s been murdered . . .”

In the time it took Pete to park his patrol car beside one of the milking barns below the hangar, Mike shot out of the plane and down the steel steps, his mood characteristically brightened. “Excellent!” he called as he joined me, his...

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Verlag
RANDOM HOUSE
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679455698
ISBN 13 
9780679455691
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
608
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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