Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

From TheBookbag

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Genre: Crime

Reviewer: Dan Hooper
Summary: A flawed but engaging detective thriller, which will almost certainly make a great movie.
Buy? No	Borrow? Yes
Format: Hardback 482 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd March 2008
ISBN: 978-1847371263
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Leo is a hero after World War 2 and a successful agent in the MGB; a man unquestioningly loyal to his mother Russia, despite having to do questionable duties, until he discovers a mistake in the system and is powerless to do anything. He makes a vindictive and vicious enemy of the lower ranking but ambitious officer Vasili, a man whom Leo humiliates. Meanwhile, his wife Raisa is named as a spy and Leo's loyalty is tested. In the aftermath of the scandal, Leo's life is turned upside down and he is demoted and sent into exile in Southern Russia as a lowly militia man, where he discovers a series of child murders that the state has tried to cover up.

Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 is a tale of one man in a corrupt system and his fight to do the right thing. The protagonist Leo is a communist Jack Bauer, a man who will sacrifice himself for the greater good, a conflicted man with a decent moral sense. Sadly as a direct result of his attempts at doing right, sometimes things have a knock on negative effect, a fact which does not escape Leo's attention – for example, after the murder of a young boy, Leo tries to organise a man hunt for the killer, but the homosexual population of a town is named and disgraced. The dynamic between Leo and Raisa is interesting as their marriage is revealed as a loveless sham, which neither is brave enough to leave. In a climate where friends and family could disappear without trace or investigation, their marriage is one based on fear and Raisa both loathes her husband and fears his position in the MGB.

Unfortunately this is where decent characterisation ends. Antagonist Visili is a comically Machiavellian figure of evil menace lacking redeeming features, while the child killer's motivations are crude at best, even though he's based on a genuine serial killer. As Leo's boss in the militia, Nesterov seems to transform himself much too quickly from enemy to ally of Leo. Other than the ticket office clerk Aleksandr, a young man with a secret, most of the supporting characters are too one dimensional to remember.

Smith's writing style is easy to read with the book having a natural flow to it. A sense of fear and depression is maintained and attention to detail is paid to the setting and era. Despite this Child 44 never truly conjures the sense of being in Soviet Russia; written in the third-person omniscient form, it sometimes reads like a commentary by an outsider, with references to Soviet Russia feeling unnatural thus keeping the reader detached from the setting, something which could have been avoided with use of better descriptions or a first-person narrative.

A flawed but interesting debut from Smith, Child 44 remains a detective story that grips like a vice and is a real page turner, thanks to a very readable writing style and an interesting protagonist. Though the book goes a twist too far, with the ending seeming more at home in a Hollywood thriller (it is no surprise that it has already been optioned by Ridley Scott), fans of the detective thriller genre will be satisfied.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

If you enjoy this type of book you'll probably also like The Blue Zone by Andrew Gross or Fatherland by Robert Harris.

You can read more reviews of this book at Amazon

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