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In a country ruled by fear, no one is innocent.

Stalin's Soviet Union is an official paradise, where citizens live free from crime and fear only one thing: the all-powerful state. Defending this system is idealistic security officer Leo Demidov, a war hero who believes in the iron fist of the law. But when a murderer starts to kill at will and Leo dares to investigate, the State's obedient servant finds himself demoted and exiled. Now, with only his wife at his side, Leo must fight to uncover shocking truths about a killer-and a country where "crime" doesn't exist.

I've never been a great fan of the espionage/political thriller genre. I don't exactly dislike it - I thought "The Bourne Identity" and "Old Boys" were pretty good, and "The Manchurian Candidate" is excellent - but I don't gravitate toward it either. It was the serial-killer plot, loosely based on the Andrei Chikatilo case, not the Soviet Russia setting, that made me excited to read Tom Rob Smith's "Child 44." An immediately engaging opening chapter sets up the premise of violence against children (and will call the Chikatilo case to the mind of any reader familiar with it, even if they didn't know beforehand that Smith had drawn on some of its details for inspiration), and we first meet Leo Demidov when he goes to "convince" a grieving father that his son's death was an accident, not a murder. After that, however, Smith sets the child-murder plot on the back burner for 150 pages, while Leo tracks a fugitive and butts heads with an ambitious, spiteful colleague and faces an ethical dilemma in which he has to choose between his job and his wife - and I was turning the pages so greedily, I hardly noticed. The chapters dealing with Leo's life in Moscow as an MGB officer read less like a political thriller and more like a historical dystopia. And when Leo's choices bring him back across the path of the child-murderer, this page-turner kicks into overdrive.

Although Smith's straightforward prose style and skill at building suspense drew me in from the start, as did his gift for bringing his minor characters so vividly to life in the space of a few pages that I honestly cared whether they lived or died, I did recognize a few flaws in the novel very early on, although I was enjoying the story too much to care. I don't know how "Child 44" passed through as many editorial hands as Smith's acknowledgements imply without anyone catching the more distractingly obvious, occasionally comic, misplaced modifiers. Also, I had to regard the historical accuracy of the novel somewhat skeptically, even before I had read the criticisms of those whose knowledge of the time and place in which the story is set far exceeds mine, based on the characters' names. "Leo" isn't a Russian name, not even as a short form of "Leonid." (I don't know if "Child 44" has ever been translated into Russian, but Russian websites discussing the film adaptation refer to the protagonist as "Lev Demidov.") Furthermore, although Smith seems to be generally aware of patronymics and diminutives, his use of them is neither nuanced nor consistent.

A more serious flaw, however, is the novel's ending. There's a major plot twist that genuinely shocked me, but once the initial impact wore off, I felt rather cheated: it was just too improbable a development, and at the eleventh hour no less, with no foreshadowing to speak of. After that, what had been a thoughtful thriller gave way to sequences of cinematic derring-do and a resolution that was altogether too pat. In a straight-to-paperback pulp thriller, it would have worked, but the first 350 pages of "Child 44" had led me to expect something a little more plausible, a little more haunting, a little less open-and-shut.

Although the ending is a bit of a letdown, it remains entertaining, and Smith's characters, intriguingly nuanced though never exactly complex, remain people you care about, whose story you'll want to follow all the way to the end. I wouldn't say "Child 44" is an unmissable reading experience, but it's fast and absorbing, and thriller fans will find it worth their while to pick up. Meanwhile, the strengths of this debut novel are such that I'm eager to read more by Tom Rob Smith, to see how his talents have matured.

Name: jonathan briggs
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Suh-suh-suh Soviet psuh-psuh-psuh psycho killer
Date: Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2014
Review: Russian war hero Leo Demidov has been a true believer all his life. "His levelheadedness, military success, good looks, and above all his absolute and sincere belief in his country had resulted in him becoming the poster boy -- quite literally -- for the Soviet liberation of German occupied territory." After the war, Leo is a perfect fit for the national security service. He's great at grilling suspected subversives, but he never questions the state. "The duty of an investigator was to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered then they hadn't scratched deep enough."

When a child turns up cut to pieces on train tracks, Leo acknowledges the tragedy but recognizes its essential meaninglessness in terms of his job. It was just an accident, right? "Careless children, unless they were careless with their tongues, were not State Security concerns." But the boy's parents are disturbing the commie quiet by raising all sorts of allegations about murder, a crime inconceivable under Josef Stalin's utopia, so Leo is sent to settle the grieving community down.

Leo's task distracts him from what he feels is a more important case: Anatoly Brodsky, a veterinarian who treats foreign dignitaries' animals, is suspected of spying, and he rabbited (sorry) while Leo was busy assuring the dead boy's family that the official verdict of accidental death is unassailable and unquestionable. It's all in the report! Now back to the chase.

At great personal risk, Leo retrieves Brodsky and brings him in for interrogation. Leo witnesses Brodsky undergo a mentally and physically debilitating process that results in a confession Leo knows is bogus. Doubt begins to creep in, eroding his convictions about ends and means and the greater good. Then he receives his next assignment: Investigate his own wife, Raisa.

Leo has been conditioned throughout his life to believe the "official report" as absolute truth. If it's in the report, well, that's how it went down. But now he's being set up by a vindictive subordinate, his family is endangered, and he realizes how easily the system can be manipulated by those with the power to define their own truth.

Leo and Raisa are arrested, but prosecuting a war hero and the public epitome of good commie values could prove problematic for the state, so Leo and his wife are exiled -- er, transferred -- to a new job in the sticks, a factory town that produces a car no one in Russia can afford to drive. "First and foremost this was a place of industrial production, a distant second a place to live."

Leo is assigned to work with the rube militia. "Every schoolchild was taught that murder, theft, and rape were symptoms of a capitalist society, and the role of the militia had been ranked accordingly. There was no need to steal and no violence between citizens because there was equality. There was no need for a police force in a Communist State. It was for this reason that the militia were nothing more than a lowly subsection of the Ministry of Interior: poorly paid, poorly respected -- a force comprised of secondary school dropouts, farmworkers kicked off the kolkhoz, discharged army personnel, and men whose judgment could be bought with half a bottle of vodka."

As often happens in this kind of novel, evil doings follow our hero, and Leo's first case is a murder with details suspiciously similar to the "accidental" death of the boy at the beginning of our story. More bodies are discovered, each bearing the marks of a habitual child murderer. That such a thing could even exist in a workers' paradise is an affront to a government that could easily squash the man investigating. "Our system is perfectly arranged to allow this man to kill as many times as he likes. And he's going to kill again and again, and we're going to keep arresting the wrong people, innocent people, people we don't like, or people we don't approve of, and he's going to kill again and again."

Although the reader is required to swallow a whopping ridiculous late-act revelation that smashes through the credibility barricades like a runaway tank piloted by Boris Yeltsin on a Stoli bender, "Child 44" is a likable book, but I have to nitpick about some sloppy editing. It's an occupational hazard with me. I edit for a living, so I get peeved by free-roaming clauses ("Caught by surprise, snow exploded around his ears.") and ungainly POV shifts. Take note of how many times Tom Rob Smith writes "in order to" when a simple "to" would suffice. And dammit, there's that "try and" again!

It's awfully hard to wring out new excitement from the thoroughly dessicated dishrag that the serial killer thriller has become. (Kudos to the folks behind "True Detective" for reintroducing actual terror and stomachache-inducing tension to the genre.) Smith incorporates elements of the political thriller and the Soviet setting to distinguish his book from the standard cop-chase-killer novel, but ultimately, "Child 44" is rather well-behaved and doesn't wander too far from its genre parents. And that's fine. A thriller writer doesn't have to reinvent the ritual murder each time out -- though I wish more authors would take a stab at doing so. "Child 44" is likely to keep most readers interested enough to go on to the second book of this trilogy, and that's accomplishment enough.

As far as NPR's blurb ranking this "one of the top 100 thrillers of all time," I would respectfully suggest to the nice people with the gentle radio voices who wake me up every morning that they might want to consider Gene Simmons' advice to venture outside their studios more often. Terry Gross could probably use the sunshine.