Child 44 /

The serial killers who romp through thrillers are supposed to be, among other things, symbols of childhood fears grown to adult paranoia, but what if the bogeyman under the bed was real all along? That's the premise behind CHILD 44 (Grand Central, $24.99), Tom Rob Smith's first novel, about a serial killer in Stalinist Russia who can't be caught because he doesn't officially exist - otherwise, the totalitarian government wouldn't be able to blame political undesirables for his crimes. Certain plot particulars are drawn directly from the gruesome career of Andrei Chikatilo, who eluded detection for 12 years, killing more than 50 people, most of them children. But by recasting this monster in metaphorical guise, Smith makes him a symbol for Soviet atrocities committed in secrecy. In another nice stroke of literary shape-shifting, Leo Demidov, the young security officer who makes it his personal mission to track down the killer, becomes his ideological doppelgänger the one who dares to point a finger at the atrocious crimes a ruthless dictator has rendered invisible. "The killer would continue to kill," Leo realizes, "concealed not by any masterful brilliance but by his country's refusal to even admit that such a man existed." Leo wasn't always so insightful. When introduced, he's an idealistic believer in the Communist system, a robotic enforcer of its punitive laws. ("Terror was necessary," he reasons, because it sustains the state. "Fear was cultivated" and "fear was part of his job.") It takes a murdered child and an order to denounce his own wife to open his closed mind. Even then, he can't help mourning his loss of faith and personal integrity, a yearning that's both the source of his bravery and the means of his redemption. Despite the vividness of their grim detail, the novel's early scenes of misery in 1950s Soviet Russia are static and wordy. But once Leo and his wife are banished to a town in the Ural Mountains, where another murder is committed, the narrative whips into action as a fugitive drama. The language becomes leaner, the style more fluid and cinematic, as Leo's forbidden investigation causes more innocent people to suffer and transforms this onetime war hero into a criminal. In a society riven by fear and mistrust, even a serial killer seems less threatening than a man who has learned to think for himself. With so much good crime fiction coming out of Scandinavia these days, it helps to get a solid handle on a writer - and with Kjell Eriksson, what we find is an extraordinary depth of feeling for honest people caught up in serious crime. There are plenty of lawless characters in THE DEMON OF DAKAR (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), which is set in the Swedish city of Uppsala and follows the efforts of a tightly knit unit of homicide detectives to find connections between the murder of a restaurateur and other, seemingly unrelated acts of violence. But these crimes serve mainly to draw out the author's compassion for marginal people like Manuel Alavez, who has traveled all the way from Mexico to visit the prison where his brother is incarcerated for drug-running, and Eva Willman, a single mother whose hopes for breaking out of poverty with a new waitressing job are compromised when one of her teenage sons starts hanging out with a drug dealer. As he did in "The Princess of Burundi" and "The Cruel Stars of the Night," Eriksson shows how crime undermines the foundations of both family and community. Eva appreciates the "durability" of the city's stonework, which "no human force could shift." But she's wrong about that. Sam Acquillo has lost some of his scruffy appeal since he washed up in the Long Island village of Southampton in Chris Knopfs first novel, "The Last Refuge." A burnout case from the corporate jungle, Sam is still living alone in his bayside cottage in HEAD WOUNDS (Permanent Press, $28), and he's still talking philosophy with his dog. But between steady work as a carpenter and the romance he has going with a gorgeous wealthy neighbor, Sam's claim on existential angst seems pretty tenuous. Knopf tries to restore the gloom by designating Sam as the chief suspect in the murder of a shady housing developer, a tag that doesn't really stick. For all his reputation as a tough guy, it's only when Sam sits down to chew the fat with bartenders, fishermen, teachers and other hard-working townies that we remember why it's such a pleasure to visit this seaside refuge the tourists never see. Reprinting old work can be a thankless duty or an act of homage. It feels like homage when Rue Morgue Press reissues 1930s puzzle mysteries by John Dickson Carr. Or when Vintage works its methodical way through the complete oeuvre of Ross Macdonald. And that certainly applies to the long-lost pulp novels of writers like Mickey Spillane and Lawrence Block brought out by Hard case. But the rescue job Serpent's Tail is doing for the great noir writer Derek Raymond is like a holy rite. HOW THE DEAD LIVE (Serpent's Tall, paper, $14.95) is from his Factory Series, crime novels depicting 1980s London as the 10th circle of hell, as seen through the haunted eyes of a police inspector in the Department of Unexplained Deaths. Sent to the countryside to investigate the disappearance of a doctor's wife, the unnamed narrator discovers that rural England is as rotten as London. "It hardly ever smells of lilac," Raymond writes in that weird voice of his, cynical and hopeless, but so tender you could cry - or open a vein. In Tom Rob Smith's first novel, a serial killer in Stalinist Russia can't be caught because he doesn't officially exist.

*Starred Review* In the workers' paradise of Stalin's Russia, crime cannot exist. Loyal, hardworking citizens will have all their needs met by the state, making crime unnecessary. The one exception is political crime, and MGB (State Security) officer Leo Demidov works long hours arresting people and delivering them to dreaded Lubyanka Prison. Deeply patriotic, but covetous of the perks of his position, Leo knows that many of the people he arrests are innocent, and he knows that he could suffer a similar fate. He does, almost, when office politics, MGB style, dictate his transfer to the lowly militia in a small city hundreds of miles east of Moscow. There he discovers that a serial killer is preying on children in cities along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Having lost almost everything, Leo seeks redemption by hunting the killer, but his effort makes him a high-profile enemy of the state (acknowledging that a serial killer could exist in the USSR is tantamount to treason). Child 44 powerfully personalizes the Orwellian horrors of life in Stalin's Russia. Almost every page echoes Hobbes' description of the life of man: nasty, brutish, and short. First-novelist Smith's pacing is relentless; readers wanting to put the book down for a brief rest may find themselves persevering regardless. Expect the same kind of critical acclaim for this compelling tale that greeted the publication of Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (1981) more than 25 years ago. Like most first novels, Smith's debut isn't perfect, but it's a very, very good read. Don't miss it.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist

Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, this stellar debut from British author Smith offers appealing characters, a strong plot and authentic period detail. When war hero Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a rising star in the MGB, the State Security force, is assigned to look into the death of a child, Leo is annoyed, first because this takes him away from a more important case, but, more importantly, because the parents insist the child was murdered. In Stalinist Russia, there's no such thing as murder; the only criminals are those who are enemies of the state. After attempting to curb the violent excesses of his second-in-command, Leo is forced to investigate his own wife, the beautiful Raisa, who's suspected of being an Anglo-American sympathizer. Demoted and exiled from Moscow, Leo stumbles onto more evidence of the child killer. The evocation of the deadly cloud-cuckoo-land of Russia during Stalin's final days will remind many of Gorky Park and Darkness at Noon, but the novel remains Smith's alone, completely original and absolutely satisfying. Rights sold in more than 20 countries. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Grisly, gruesome, and gory are just three ways to describe this debut novel by young British screenwriter Smith. While adapting a short story by sf writer Jeff Noon, Smith came across the true account of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who after killing more than 50 women and children was executed in 1994. His story inspired Smith to write this grim, 1953-set novel, which ties together just about all of the worst aspects of the Stalinist regime. The Ukrainian famine and the unrelieved horror of the gulag, among other historical hooks, add to the saga of ex-soldier and police official Leo Demidov, who dissects the morbid clues left by the killer. The paradox of crime in a workers' paradise denies any legitimacy to Leo's investigation, since, by definition, such repellent crimes are impossible. With some 20 foreign sales to date and film rights already in Ridley Scott's hands, this successor to Hannibal Lector's lurid mantle has nonstop plotting, a nonstop pace, and even a surprise ending. Horror genre readers will thrill to it; others may be advised to ask for a barf bag as well as their date due slip. Suspense collections in large libraries will likely need several copies to fill waiting lists. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/08.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

During the terror of Stalin's last days, a secret policeman becomes a detective stalking a serial killer in a debut novel from a shockingly talented 28-year-old Brit. Skillfully drawing on the only totalitarian milieu more frightening than the Nazis, Smith opens the book in a village of starving kulaks, where two young brothers set out in the snow to trap the last local cat that hasn't been eaten. Myopic young Andrei throws himself on the frantic feline only to have both cat and older brother Pavel snatched by a mysterious man who bags them and disappears, leaving Andrei to stumble home alone. Both Pavel and Andrei figure later in a plot that shifts to the early '50s as Father Stalin has begun his final mad purges. War hero MGB officer Leo Stepanovich Demidov begins to realize, during the course of performing his brutal State Security duties, that the death of the four-year-old son of a younger associate may not have been as accidental as the official report suggested. Family and neighbors claim that the child was brutally assaulted before being left on the railroad tracks. The problem for good soldier Leo is that in the Glorious Workers' Paradise, where every citizen has everything he needs, there is no such thing as crime. There are only attacks by the corrupt outside world. Leo has another problem. His beautiful wife Raisa, whom he suspects of infidelity, has been charged by Leo's vicious rival Vasili with espionage, and Leo has been ordered to verify that claim. Learning too late that the innocent and faithful Raisa fears rather than loves him, rattled by Vasili's treachery, knowing that he is damaged goods, Leo counts himself lucky to be exiled to duty in a hick town where he discovers further murders and begins a hair-raising hunt for the perpetrator. Nerve-wracking pace and atmosphere camouflage wild coincidences. Smashing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.