The
beginning of CHILD 44, Oxford graduate Tom Rob Smith’s debut
novel, is unrelentingly grim. It is a double-time, stiff-legged
forced march through the forbidding and unforgiving landscape of
Soviet Ukraine in 1933, featuring a description of two brothers who
are trying to catch a stray cat. They are, you see, very, very
hungry.

Most of CHILD 44 takes place over the course of a stark four months
some two decades after the boys chase that unfortunate cat, in the
Stalin-era, post-World War II Soviet Union. The State is god, and
its enforcer is the State Security Force (MGB), which rules with an
Orwellian terror. Owning the wrong book or saying the wrong thing
can earn a one-way ticket to the Gulag for 20 years. As Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn so famously pointed out, if you did nothing, you only
received a seven-year sentence.

Leo Demidov is one of the best MGB officers, a war hero and an
idealist who has reaped the rewards of his position, not the least
of which are his beautiful wife and their relatively comfortable
apartment in Moscow. But his world is turned upside down when he is
targeted by an underling and abruptly demoted. Shipped with his
wife to a grim industrial city in the Russian wilderness, Demidov
suffers the ultimate humiliation, serving as the equivalent of a
small-town cop in a country where there officially is no crime. He
is horrified when he investigates the murder of a young boy in the
area that has dark but unmistakable similarities to an earlier
slaying that supposedly had been solved and, worse, bears an
unsettling resemblance to the death of a child in Moscow that
Demidov, with implicit pressure from his superiors, had classified
as an accident.

Demidov is sure that a monster prowls throughout Russia, killing
youngsters at will, and feels duty-bound to investigate. But how
can he investigate a crime that does not exist? The State has
decreed itself a paradise, and to declare otherwise is tantamount
to treason. Having already lost everything, Demidov does not have
much farther to fall, yet he feels he has a duty to stop the evil
soul that roams the nation seemingly invisible and at will. To do
so, however, he will have to confront not only his past but also
the truth about his life, his marriage and his very existence, even
as the investigation leads to a surprising and shocking
climax.

Tom Rob Smith’s subject matter is the stuff of waking
nightmares. While comparisons to GORKY PARK are probably
inevitable, such are appropriate only with regard to locale and to
time period (and then, only roughly). Smith manages to infuse the
story with unique twists and turns that will catch even long-time
thriller readers by surprise. Exquisitely plotted and wonderfully
but fearfully told, CHILD 44 is one of this year’s
wonders.