Child 44

This is not a book to be read on the beach. Wait for a chilly winter's day and then enter the bleak world of the Soviet Union in the last years of Stalin's dictatorship. A serial killer is on the loose yet no one dares say so. Under Stalin's paternal guidance this is a perfect Socialist utopia where crime does not exist, in contrast to the benighted capitalist countries of the west. To suggest that children are being randomly murdered is tantamount to treason and will bring the secret police straight to your door. But in the end it is… show more.

So good it was made into a movie. The movie however didn’t catch the suspense, and the investigation took far longer in the book.

Set in Stalinist Russia, the book is depressing, as was Commie Russia. The investigator, Leo Demidov’s friend has a child gone missing and a cursory investigation by the state goes nowhere. Leo Demidov, a Moscow investigator looks into it and is told to lay off—or else—because he makes the state look incompetent.

He and his family are exiled far away from Moscow and scorned by everyone. But he continues and discovers 44 children have been murdered… show more.

Because I bought it on a whim, having not heard much about it, and honestly, I was in the mood for something set during the cold, and this cool book cover sold me. And sometimes the best serial killer novels burrow into the reader’s soul—mine, in this case—when you go into it not knowing it’s a serial killer novel! But this one was dark and perfectly cold and chilling and made me feel like I was right in the middle of Cold War Soviet Union. It’s a brutal world Rob Tom Smith creates here, but the MGB officer Leo Demidov… show more.

As you can guess from the last answer I hate totalitarianism, whether it comes from the right or left. Child 44 pits an average, decent man – who happens to be a Soviet detective in the Stalin era – against the idiocy that comes when politics interferes with justice, and tragedy results. If you think it’s tough when a US detective has to buck a Mayor, or city council member, think how much worse it would be if the impediment to justice is a whole national system.