Child 44

Leo Demidov is an officer of the MGB, the State Security Force of Stalin's Soviet Union, and he believes in his work. A war hero with a beautiful wife, Raisa, he lives comfortably in Moscow and has even found a decent apartment for his parents. He has arrested and interrogated people for what he sees as the greater good.

The official line holds that the country is a paradise for its workers, and that paradise has no ordinary crime. Yet millions live in fear of the State itself. Owning a book from the decadent West or saying the wrong word at the wrong time can send an innocent person to the Gulags or to an execution.

Then a murderer begins killing at will. At the same moment Leo is demoted and denounced by his enemies, and the convictions he has lived by fall apart. Saving himself and his family depends on finding the killer, but to hint that a serial killer exists at all is an offence against the State.

Exiled from his home, with only Raisa still beside him, Leo has to face the huge reach of the MGB while he hunts a criminal the authorities refuse to admit is real. The book is a thriller in a paranoid world where nobody can be trusted, and it also follows a marriage and a family under pressure.