Caleb Carr’s first two novels, “The Angel of Darkness” and “The Alienist,” were intricately plotted and suspense-filled detective tales set in 1920s New York. Carr earned rave reviews for his excellent characters and acute sense of historical accuracy, as well as for his grisly and compelling depiction of the Roaring ’20s.
With “Killing Time,” his latest novel, Carr looks forward to the year 2023 where corporations rule the government, the environment has been thoroughly decimated and the Internet is both an informational tool and a pacifier of the people.
Carr seems less sure in the future of 2023 than in the gritty, grimy past of the 1920s. His characters are less solid than in his previous efforts. His hero, criminal profiler Dr. Gideon Wolfe, is a mere shadow of Dr. Laszlo Kriezler, the star of his two earlier novels. Wolfe is merely a spectator in the dark and complicated machinations that surround him, continually asking “why?” as the reader struggles along with him to understand the labyrinthine plot.
The plot has something to do with a band of futuristic pirates who fly around the globe, creating havoc in the hopes that the populace will rise up and overthrow their corporate overlords. In the process, they kidnap Wolfe and make him an accomplice in their schemes.
Their reasons for this are never exactly clear, and their motivations behind forging historical documents and causing general mayhem aren’t either. But Carr knows how to pace a good story, and readers will keep turning the pages until the book is finished.
Carr seemed more at home with the straight-ahead classic detective stories of his earlier books; his descriptions and characters were gripping and real. Here, he falls into the trap that snares many science-fiction authors and struggles to create a believable alternate reality that is still grounded in events happening today.
“Killing Time” is not a bad book. It’s just simply not the equal of “The Alienist” or “The Angel of Darkness.” While readers hung onto the climax of those two tales, waiting for the suspenseful conclusion, they will be sorely disappointed with the time-machine-enabled resolution of this one.
Perhaps Carr should take a time machine back to the 1920s, as he was obviously more at home there.