Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

There are times where I am in the middle of a book and I put it down and think to myself - this is why I love reading. I had that kind of feeling while reading Child 44. I had read a review of it in a magazine and it caught my interest right away. I put it on my TBR list and then found it in a used bookstore in Munich.

As i posted previously I have been in a reading slump lately so I really needed something that I wasn't going to be able to put down. That is what I got! Here is what Publishers Weekly says "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."

Sounds good huh? Well I throughly enjoyed very bit of this book and was so excited when I found out that there was going to be a follow up book. I really liked the characters and I loved how Leo's blind obediance to the Soviet State fell apart when he started really thinking about what he was being asked to do. I realized after reading this book that I need to read more about Stalin and the Soviet Union. I know very little about the subject and was horrified by what I have been finding out. I had previously read some novels that dealt with work camps but I never really went any further than that.

I like books that open my eyes to new things. And this one certainly did!