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"Our system is perfectly arranged," Leo tells a fellow officer, "to allow this man to kill as many times as he likes." Indeed, it's a dark joke in "Child 44" that any attempt to take action against the serial killer through official Soviet law-enforcement channels has dire consequences. In the actual case on which "Child 44" was based, many innocents and patsies were accused of murder by the State before the real killer was found.

All this might make "Child 44" seem like a slog or a history lesson, but it's not; it is, in fact, a tremendously exciting thriller. In a refreshing twist on the serial killer genre, our hero is in no danger from the murderer himself; instead, it's the State that puts our detective in peril, and that peril feels entirely convincing and frightening. A number of bravura set pieces -- including a gruesome escape from a Gulag-bound train, using only a dead man's tooth as a tool -- pepper the plot, suggesting that the inevitable "Child 44" film will be awfully exciting. (Ridley Scott has acquired the rights.)

"Child 44" has its flaws. Smith is not a born mystery writer, and the novel suffers when he's forced to write to his genre; we could do without a number of the scenes in which we meet a brand new character who we just know is going to be attacked in a few pages. Smith does his best to subvert such moments, but they still provoke some eye-rolling.

Leo is provided a Javert-like nemesis, Vasili, whose pursuit of our hero feels unmotivated and schematic. And Smith's final-act revelation of the connection between our killer and our hero, too, feels awfully melodramatic. But these are quibbles, really, about an inventive first novel that strips its hero of all he's believed in and forces him to build himself as a new and better man.

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