Books

The consequences of removing the blinders that keep us from seeing things as they are can be harsh and terrible. The decision to remove them and then find the courage to follow the truth to the end is the central issue of this high-intensity action yarn.

It's a classic Saul-to-Paul conversion tale and psychological thriller of a kind that is rare today.

As an officer in the MGB, which was the Stalinist-era Soviet intelligence and counter-intelligence agency, Russian war hero Leo Stepanovich Demidov has apprehended hundreds of innocent citizens and approved of their torture-induced confessions, imprisonments and executions. But "not even those who kept this machinery of fear ticking could be certain that the system they sustained would not one day swallow them up."

And so in the winter of 1953, when Leo is mysteriously compelled to solve a series of grisly child murders that the "crime-free" state cannot admit exists, his comfortable but empty existence begins to disintegrate and his blinders fall by the wayside. His superiors, principally the nefarious and pathologically vengeful Vasili, whom he has slighted, maintain that the murders are unrelated and are the work of residual Nazi terrorists, exacting reprisals for their defeat in World War II. Leo knows, somehow, that they are the work of one man.

He is propelled onward to stop the killer, even if it means losing everything. And, for a time, he does. Both he and Raisa, his unloving wife, are deemed traitors and must run for their lives. In the countryside between Leningrad and Rostov, on the railroad line where most of the murders occur, they encounter the byproducts of a government that admits to no faults.

They meet with depravity and deprivation, widespread roundups and punishment of innocent gay men, fear, betrayals, suicides, torture, executions and filthy rat-infested orphanages. Following the killer's trail along these iron rails of sorrow, Leo and Raisa must rely on the villagers for protection from Vasili's pathological vendetta. At every turn they must outwit and elude him, and there are many cliffhanger moments. Their defeats pile up like derailed boxcars, but Leo and Raisa move ever onward.

Readers will be glad they do, as each page brings fulfillment in the tradition of Dostoyevsky's psychological realism and Charles Dickens and his predictably unpredictable story lines, complete with illogical occurrences, incredible coincidences and nail-biter scrapes. While this young writer employs Dickens' technique, he has not mastered his skill. We might visualize him backstage, orchestrating the episodic somersaults and twists, but we give him a pass because the book is so good and, after finishing it, we may feel that our own blinders have slipped, if but a notch.

NPR commentator Tom Dodge, www.tomdodgebooks.com, lives in Midlothian.

Tom Robb Smith

(Grand Central Publishing, $24.95)

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