Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
IN Stalin’s Soviet Union, there was no crime, so the existence of a serial killer who was murdering children all over the country couldn’t be admitted, never mind investigated. This is the premise of Tom Rob Smith’s thriller, Child 44, which is set in the Soviet Union in the months before and after Stalin’s death in 1953.
The main character is a Soviet secret policeman, Leo Demidov, who initially believes that these killings are the unrelated work of ‘deviants’ within society. Slowly, as he and his wife come under investigation from the omnipresent state apparatus, he begins to see a link to the deaths and the reality that there is a serial killer on the loose. However, his determination to investigate these crimes puts him and his wife in danger as they come under suspicion and investigation themselves.
Child 44 is the first part of a trilogy, and it is a gripping novel. It’s one of those books that you can’t put down, and the descriptions of the serial killer and his modus operandi are absolutely chilling.
The book apparently takes the gruesome true case of Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered over fifty people in the 1970s and 80s in the Soviet Union, and the novel illustrates the bureaucratic insanity of the Soviet regime, where the communist utopia could not and would not accept that any of its citizens could ever perpetrate such heinous ‘capitalist’ crimes, while the paranoia and suspicion which pervaded every aspect of life in the Soviet Union is brilliantly portrayed.
The other two books in the trilogy are The Secret Speech and Agent 6, and I’m looking forward to reading them. If they’re even half as good as Child 44, then we’ve got a top-class trilogy on our hands.
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