It’s postwar Russia. Stalin’s new world is paradise. No
crime because everyone is equal . . . no wants . . . no needs . . . Crime is the band of capitalism and just
doesn’t exist in the new worker's paradise . . . verified by the communist regime.
Leo Demidov is a poster boy for the new Russia. A hero of
the Great Patriotic War. His smiling picture aboard a flaming German tank was
frontpage news. Now he works for internal security. His boss wants him to sweep
the death of a colleague’s young son under the rug as a tragic accident with a
train. While looking into another odd problem, an ambitious subordinate
executes a couple farmers in front of their children, and Leo calls him
down-hard. Now Leo has a problem about
who can he trust. This is Stalin’s Russia, where the office line of state
security is “Trust, but check” that has since become “Check on those we trust.”
Said subordinate plants a rumor that Leo’s wife is an enemy
of the state. All Leo has to do is denounce her, but he doesn’t. Instead, Leo
and his wife are banished to a nothing outpost working for the local militia,
the lowest form of human because these are the ones who handle most of the local
dirty work for the State. Lucky for Leo. Others have been executed for less.
In this factory town, a child’s body is found, string tied
around the ankles, naked, crushed bark stuffed in the mouth, and the stomach
dissected out. Similar to how his colleague’s child was found. Leo wants to
look into it but his new chief is dead set against Leo possibly finding
something. If he did, the local militia would look incompetent because they
just executed the main suspect. Incompetence is not tolerated; right up to the
top and incompetence is a sure ticket to a gulag.
A third child is found in the forest of a neighboring
village. A tense standoff with his chief ends with the chief reluctantly
agreeing to investigate, but only very quietly, very off the record. But this is
hard in a country where “the most important thing was a person’s relationship
with the state” in a country that does not acknowledge capital crime and
certainly doesn’t communicate between towns and other local governments. Some careful and quiet investigative work
reveals 43 such deaths, Leo’s colleague’s son was number 44.
This is a first rate police procedural set amongst the fear
and paranoia rampant in the lowly citizens of Russia. Smith’s debut expertly
portrays a citizenry that figuratively lives looking over both shoulders at the
same time. It takes only a suspicion to be sent off and tortured, only to get a
bullet in the back, of the head or a lifetime in a gulag. How could one live
there in that time? It was a worker’s paradise, the Russian government told us
it was. Seriously?
FYI, Child 44 has been optioned to Hollywood (no timetable
yet) and is part 1 of a trilogy about Leo Demidov. Part 2 was picked checked out
of the library yesterday.
I loved the sense of place in this one. If you've ever walked in Russia, you'll recognize lots of places.
ReplyDeleteHaven't read anymore of Rob Smith but he is on my list.
and he should be. Check out his next, Secret Speech, just reviewed. Liked it better, not by much, but better.
ReplyDeleteIt's really, really dark, and only lightens briefly in the last few pages - lots of ugliness here. I'm not a fan.
ReplyDelete