The Death Instinct

(Riverhead Books) This historical mystery starts off with New York’s first terrorist attack, which occurred on September 16, 1920, when a bomb exploded on Wall Street.   In this story, war veteran and surgeon Stratham Younger and his friends, a police captain and a French chemist, follow a trail of evidence that takes them throughout Europe and back to Washington, D.C. in order to discover who is responsible for the attacks. Rubenfeld is a professor at Yale University Law School and a novelist.