Review: Child 44

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The very first thing to comment on is the style of the printing. Dialogue is not in quotes, but italics and preceded by a long hyphen. There are no chapters in the conventional sense, the book is split up into scenes (ready for the film?).
These things take a little getting used to, but if we put presentation aside and concentrate on content the message is very different. I have lived through the lies that came out of Soviet Russia and read a little about what it was like inside. At the start of the book we see the abject poverty that existed in Stalinist Russia. Whole villages are starving to death. The first scene is about children trying to catch a cat to eat, at a time when all the cats have long ago been eaten - where has this one come from? (That piece of background has been provided for the reader, but not the characters.) The atmosphere this scene generates sets the whole tone for the book. In the next scenes, time has moved on and we are taken into into the world of the MGB (Stalin's secret police, or security service) where absolute dedication to the state is paramount and the slightest deviation or failure is rewarded with torture and death. The paranoia is well founded. Two central characters are introduced and the competitiveness between them makes for a large part of the story. Slowly their backgrounds are exposed. Sometimes this is done by a straight forward flashback scene, sometimes by revealing the characters internal thought processes. Their relationships with others, particularly around the central character (Leo Demidov) are slowly built and expanded. We begin to find out a little about Raisa, Leo's wife.
Leo is given some awful things to do - arrest people who are clearly innocent, torture them to get a 'confession' and have them killed. Then a child is murdered and Leo is given the job of covering it up - because Communist society could not possibly have murderers - there is no need to murder.
As the power games are played out, first one then the other of the rivals is on top, but things go wrong for Leo and he is moved, finally about half way through the book our detective is in the right location to begin to solve the crime. Until then there is little clue as to the main theme of the book.
That does not make the story slow at any point, with well drawn characters and a real sense of danger there is excitement from the minute the cat is discovered all the way through. Of course towards the end of the story the tension increases and there is a real chance that they will never solve the crime.
The story is based on a real criminal case, but how closely it is impossible to say. The crime itself is bizarre enough for a double episode of CSI or a BBC mini-series. The ending however, once the crime has been resolved is even more of a surprise and I wonder how close to the real events it can be, leaving as it does the possibility of a 'happy ever after' for at least some of the characters.

This is a primarily a detective story, and like all good detective story the loose ends are carefully rounded up and dealt with. It is also partly a love story, and partly a horror story, but most of all it is a story that draws you into the world in which it exists and the lives of the characters it portrays. Its description as a 'page turner' is thoroughly justified.

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