Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

This book came out quite a while ago and honestly I only picked it because it's narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris and after finishing Every Note Played, I wasn't quite ready to leave his voice. I knew nothing about the book, the plot, or even the true life events which inspired them. I'm not above reading novels about countries in which the author has no experience (I have read all these German detective Bernie Gunther novels by Phillip Kerr, who is British and liked them) but I do take them with a grain of salt because it is immensely different when you read a novel by a native of that country.

That being said, I read Child 44 with a quiet sort of fascination as it details not only the actions of a methodical and sadistic serial killer but also the casual cruelties of Stalin-era police abuses and political paranoia. And honestly the parts about the Soviet apparatus and why it made it so difficult to hunt for a serial killer were more interesting than the crime facts itself because honestly, the brutal killing of children is not really something I like to read about. 

The book starts with a cat and a woman in Ukraine in the 1930s, during the famine sparked by forcing everyone onto collective farms. People are starving and dying. And a woman, somehow, still owns a cat. The cat is let go when the woman lets go on her desire to live. But a boy living nearby sees the cat and makes a plan with his brother to trap and eat it. During their trip into the woods, the braver older brother is struck by a man and taken away. 

We then jump to twenty years later. The "Great Patriotic War" is over and Leo Demidov is a ranking MGB officer who is tasked with finding an alleged spy. In tracking down the spy he is forced to confront the banality of evil existing in his duties as well as the shaky foundations upon which his investigations and executions have been based. He also must convince a grieving family that they cannot speak about the murder of their five year old son, because murder does not exist in Soviet Russia. It cannot. People have no reason to murder, being housed and fed, so any suggestion of murder is the spreading of anti-soviet sentiment.

Trapped within this circular reasoning, unable to name and investigate the murder, Leo goes so far as to threaten the family into silence. He is then asked to denounce his own wife, which he refuses to do, and is demoted and sent to a remote outpost. Upon arriving at the outpost he comes upon two children similarly murdered. He must then decide to what length he is willing to go to investigate the murders and to catch the killer. 

The events of the book are loosely based on the most notorious Russian serial killer of all time, Andrei Chikatilo, who evaded capture for decades as he killed as many as 56 women and children. He was convicted and sentenced to death for 52 of these murders in October 1992 and executed in February 1994. He was arrested several times over the course of his killing spree, but bungled investigations and shoddy police work led to his release and continued destruction until he was finally arrested in November 1990. 

Chikatilo's mug shot.

Everyone you care about in this novel has a sad and complicated back story that informs their decisions, and I really liked how the author teased out each of these issues in time. I may have to read the next book in the series to find out what happens to Leo later on.

4/5 Stars.