If you like "The Alienist" by Caleb Carr...
These titles are literary, well-written and match the mood of Caleb Carr's The Alienist.
Dreamland
by Kevin Baker
"A literary tour de force, a magnificent chronicle of a remarkable era and a place of dreams. In a stunning work of imagination and memory, author Kevin Baker brings to mesmerizing life a vibrant, colorful, thrilling, and dangerous New York City in the earliest years of the twentieth century. A novel breathtaking in its scope and ambition, it is the epic saga of newcomers drawn to the promise of America--gangsters and laborers, hucksters and politicians, radicals, reformers, murderers, and sideshow oddities--whose stories of love, revenge, and tragedy interweave and shine in the artificial electric dazzle of a wondrous place called Dreamland.”—catalog summary
City of Light
by Lauren Belfer
”In the grand tradition of ‘Ragtime’ and ‘The Alienist’ comes a dazzling historical novel bursting with vibrant characters both real and imagined. At once a thriller, a love story, and a rich portrait of an American city poised for glory at the turn of the century, ‘City of Light’ is a human drama wrought with remarkable depth and intelligence.”—catalog summary
Night Inspector
by Frederick Busch
”In post-Civil War New York, an investor mounts an operation to free a group of children held as slaves in Florida. The investor is William Bartholomew who served in the Union army as a sniper and he does it at the behest of his Creole girlfriend.”—catalog summary
Feeding the Ghosts
by Fred D'Aguiar
”A suspenseful, poetic novel, based on an actual incident about a disease-ridden slave ship, a female captive, and a shocking court case.”—catalog summary
Juneteenth
by Ralph Ellison
”Here is the master of American vernacular--the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech--at the height of his powers, telling a powerful, evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. "Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate Negro preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, an orphan taken in by Hickman and raised to be a preacher like himself. Bliss's history encompasses the joys of young southern boyhood; bucolic days as a filmmaker, lovemaking in a field in the Oklahoma sun. And behind it all lies a mystery: how did this chosen child become the man who would deny everything to achieve his goals? Brilliantly crafted, moving, wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master.”—catalog summary
The Journal of Mrs. Pepys: Portrait of a Marriage
by Sara George
”The journal of Elizabeth Pepys, wife of the celebrated diarist Samuel, is the story of a passionate, if pain-fraught marriage, of a gloriously rich and robust period in our history and a woman's passage through the defining years of her life in which her search to draw significance from her existence is punctuated by the everyday urgencies of living. At times jauntily acerbic, at others movingly elegiac, this is portrait of a tumultuous relationship and era that, in its sharp-edged concerns and emotions, is utterly compelling.”—catalog summary
Hitler's Niece
by Ron Hansen
”’Hitler's Niece’ tells the story of the intense and disturbing relationship between Adolf Hitler and the daughter of his only half-sister, Angela, a drama that evolves against the backdrop of Hitler's rise to prominence and power from particularly inauspicious beginnings. The story follows Geli from her birth in Linz, Austria, through the years in Berchtesgaden and Munich, to her tragic death in 1932 in Hitler's apartment in Munich. Through the eyes of a favorite niece who has been all but lost to history, we see the frightening rise in prestige and political power of a vain, vulgar, sinister man who thrived on cruelty and hate and would stop at nothing to keep the horror of his inner life hidden from the world.”—catalog summary
Buckskin Line
by Elmer Kelton
”From a six-time Spur Award winner comes the story of a Texas Ranger who carries heavy burdens. The father and brother of the woman he loves have been lynched, and he is fated to meet the Comanche warrior whose band killed his family.”—catalog summary
A Prayer for the Dying
by Stewart O'Nan
”Set in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, ‘A Prayer for the Dying’ tells of a horrible epidemic that has gripped the town in a vise of fear and death. Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed, though he continues to do what he can. Dark, poetic, and chilling, a ‘Prayer for the Dying’ makes us consider if it's possible to be a good man in a time of madness.”—catalog summary
If these don't satisfy, or if you need suggestions for more books, please let me know.
Yours,
Mary M. Buck
Reference Librarian
Porter Branch
