Agent 6

by Tom Rob Smith
407 pgs  (Leo Demidov trilogy #3)

Agent 6 concludes Tom Rob Smith’s fantastic trilogy featuring former KGB officer, Leo Demidov. The book begins with a flashback to 1950, when Leo is training a young agent in an investigation of an artist commissioned to paint a series of murals in Moscow. The investigation also coincides with when Leo met his future wife.

The story then moves to 1965, where Leo’s wife and two daughters are given the extraordinary opportunity to accompany a choir to New York to perform a concert at the United Nations to promote good relations between the two countries. Because of his past life as a former agent, Leo isn’t allowed to go with them and must stay home in Moscow. Tragedy strikes Leo’s family while they’re in New York and the rest of the book chronicles Leo’s efforts to get to the truth of what took place.

I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed all three books in the series. Child 44, The Secret Speech, and now this one, were each amazing by themselves. Together they tell a story which is as complicated and emotional as it is rewarding.  

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The Secret Speech

by Tom Rob Smith
403 pgs  (Leo Demidov trilogy #2)

In 1956, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, gave a speech behind closed doors to the leaders of the Soviet regime. In it, he condemned Stalin and those who carried out his ruthless decrees. The purpose of the speech was to usher in a new era in the Soviet Union, an era in which the government acted in the best interests of its citizens, and the citizens didn’t live in constant fear of being condemned by coworkers, neighbors, and even family members, and sent to work in a Siberian gulag for the rest of their lives.

The speech was quickly leaked to the press and soon the MGM agents, police, judges, and everyone else who had helped Stalin maintain his genocidal dictatorship found themselves constantly looking over their shoulders, in fear of the reprisals which were occurring throughout many of the cities in Russia. Leo Demidov, the former officer of Stalin’s secret police, and the hero of Smith’s first book Child 44 is no exception.

In his years working for the secret police, Leo had sent hundreds of his countrymen to the gulags and torture chambers, and his past is determined to catch up to him. Fraera, the wife of a man Leo had betrayed and sent to a gulag in Siberia seven years ago reenters his life and is determined to destroy the new life Leo has tried to create for himself, his wife, and their two adopted daughters.

I read Child 44 a few months ago, which tells the story of Leo’s pursuit of a sensational mass murderer who prayed on children throughout Russia, and I considered it one of the best books I had read in a long time. The Secret Speech is a very different type of story, but it’s just as compelling. This time around the scope of the Smith’s story is broader and he includes several themes which made it a difficult book for me to put down.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Child 44

by Tom Rob Smith
440 pgs  (Leo Demidov series #1)

Set primarily in 1953, Child 44 is the first novel in a series by Tom Rob Smith featuring Leo Demidov, an MGB Agent in the Soviet Union. Leo has spent years hunting dissidents and meting out punishment to any and all whom he believes have done anything, said anything, or thought anything which goes against Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. He has risen in the ranks of the MGB to the point where he and his wife enjoy many comforts and luxuries not provided to most citizens. He believes in the Socialist cause and that his work is important to ensuring its strength and success.

He has been taught that since the government provides everything its citizens need, the only crimes that exist are acts committed by those trying to subvert the power and authority of the Party. Crimes like senseless murder just don't exist in the Soviet Union.

But someone is killing young children throughout western Russia. Their bodies have been found naked, with a string tied around their ankle, their stomach removed, and their mouth filled with dirt. Leo suspects that all the killings are the work of one man, but when he begins to investigate the cases, he's demoted and exiled to a small town hundreds of kilometers away from Moscow. As he continually tries to pursue the killer, he finds himself disgraced and hunted by the Party he served for so many years.

Child 44 is a fantastic book! Not only did Smith succeed in telling a compelling story of a serial killer-- a story inspired by the actual crimes of Andrei Chikatilo, aka the Rostov Ripper, the Red Ripper, and the Butcher of Rostov--but he does so against an extremely vivid backdrop. Smith does an incredible job of describing what life was like in the Soviet Union while Joseph Stalin was at its head. He describes the desperation and fear that were so prevalent throughout the Soviet Union during that time. Even without the mystery surrounding the killings the book would be worth reading, if only to learn what it was like for the typical citizen alive during that time to try to survive.  With the combination of the fascinating historical setting and the grizzly murders of a serial killer, Child 44 is a book I'll be recommending to family and friends enthusiastically.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★