Heroes don't come much more unlikely than Leo Demidov, the investigator at the center of Tom Rob Smith's debut thriller "Child 44." Sure, plenty of detectives drink, or sleep around, or get a little rough with a suspect. Demidov is in a class all his own among unsympathetic heroes, though: As a fast-rising officer in the Soviet Union's state security force, the NKVD, Leo has arrested and sent to death scores, perhaps hundreds, of innocent people.

With a hero so monstrous, how can "Child 44" be so outstanding? Because much of Smith's drama revolves around the scales falling from Demidov's eyes. And because Demidov faces an opponent vastly more frightening than he is: not the serial killer who murders children with impunity, but rather the State, which turns against Leo and his investigation. It's the State's cold and ruthless suppression of the truth and pursuit of Leo that lend "Child 44" its urgency -- and give Leo the moral weight necessary to win our respect.

As the novel opens in 1953 Moscow, Leo is sent to the home of a family who insist that their young son, Arkady, has been murdered. Such an assertion is deeply troubling in a society in which, by official edict, "there is no crime," and it's Leo's job to remind the family that Arkady's death was an accident. "An officer must train his heart to be Cruel," says Feliks Dzerzhinsky, forefather of the NKVD. Leo, a true believer in communism's potential, has trained his heart well.

But when Leo's wife, Raisa, falls under suspicion as a traitor, Leo finds himself on the wrong side of a system in which, as he well knows, "The duty of an investigator was to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered." His wife's innocence is irrelevant to an NKVD detective; "If no guilt was uncovered," Leo knows, "then they hadn't scratched deep enough."

As Leo and Raisa attempt to outrun the danger the investigation has put them in, Leo realizes that the death of Arkady was a murder -- one of a series of dozens of brutal child killings across the Soviet Union. Local police trained to deny crimes rather than solve them have declared the murders accidents, or pinned them on those who cannot defend themselves: the mentally deficient, enemies of the state, foreigners, even imaginary Nazis hiding out in the woods. As Leo, suspected of treason, is stripped of his title, his authority and his power, he commits his first legitimately treasonous act: He launches a surreptitious investigation of the child murders, convinced that a single man is responsible for all of them.

As Leo's authority erodes, his deductive skills grow. For starters, he can get people to talk to him more frankly without the authority of the NKVD behind him. But that's a mixed blessing; as his wife, Raisa, tells him after she reveals the enormous gulf in their marriage he'd never understood, "The problem with becoming powerless, as you are now, is that people start telling you the truth. You're not used to it."

Leo's dogged investigation allows Smith to paint a portrait of Stalin-era Russia that feels authentic, terrifying and bizarre. A mystery is in many ways the perfect vehicle for an author to explore an unfamiliar society. Forced by the author to poke around in the darkest corners of a nation's psyche, readers see how things really work and how people really live.

In "Child 44," a serial killer's grim work proves the perfect polarizing lens through which to view Soviet society during the era of Stalin; with the benefit of Tom Rob Smith's filter, we can see clearly how the toxic atmosphere of that time poisoned every single Russian man and woman, creating a culture of fear so pervasive that not to stop a killer of children would be the logical and proper thing to do.

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