Leo Demidov - a new fictional detective?
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
A whodunit set in Stalin's USSR, with echoes of Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at noon and Brink's A dry white season.
Generally well written, with a couple of annoying lapses (the misuse of "substitute" in a couple of places, for example).
Could the hero, Leo Demidov, be entering a career as a new fictional detective to follow? If so, this is where it all began.
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There were a couple of things i wondered about as i was reading, though. How does the author know all this stuff? How authentic is it?
I don't suppose there are many people still alive with first-hand memories of the Stalin era, though the book is set right at the end of it, in 1953. I was 12 years old then, but don't remember too much of the political currents of the time. But the author is the same age as my sons, who can't remember all that much of the apartheid era, which ended much more recently.
I also wonder if this could be the beginning of the career of a new fictional detective, like Arkady Renko, Kurt Wallander, Vicount Lynley, Adam Dalgleish, Inspector Morse et al.