Booklist (starred review)
"This concluding installment [is] another first-class, must-read crime novel...In [the] first two volumes, Smith brilliantly illuminated the horrors of Stalin's Russia and the Gulag. He also gave readers Leo Demidov, duty-bound, introspective, enduring, and ultimately a figure both tragic and heroic."
BookPage
"When a trilogy is as unpredictable and riveting as Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 series, set as it is both in the harsh Russian landscape and the dense thicket of the human soul, expectations quickly evaporate in a page-turning frenzy....Smith, a young British screenwriter turned best-selling novelist, has created in Leo Demidov a Kafkaesque modern hero for our times, a good man trapped in a corrupt, manipulative system, forced to choose between loyalties to family, country and conscience. With a cinematographer's eye for settings and historical detail, Smith uses Leo's journey to examine larger issues, especially the political, social and religious systems that both unite and divide us.
Dallas Morning News
Agent 6 has all the elements that made the first two books in the series hits: relentless action, a flawed but fascinating protagonist and a clear-eyed view of the absolute brutality of an authoritarian government.
Suspense Magazine
"With Agent 6, Smith has created an epic finale...Smith has a gift for sharply-etched characterization...A twisty thriller in a class with le Carré, Agent 6 is a satisfying culmination to the trilogy.
Financial Times
"His mastery of suspense will make any reader's heart pound.
Metro
"Superb ... action-packed, immaculately researched ... pungent and powerful.
Juxtabook
"An intricate game, a history lesson, philosophy in action.
Mirror
"After the stunning Child 44... comes the sweeping, brilliant finale of his Cold War epic.
Guardian
"The best thrillers combine narrative tension, first-rate plotting and enough psychological insight to satisfy the human hunger for identification...Smith can do all this.
Daily Telegraph
"[Agent 6 has] an improvised feel, a terrific, freewheeling energy and pace, to which Rob Smith's non-nonsense prose is perfectly suited.
Scotsman
"The phrase 'master storyteller' simply cannot do him justice...The curtain may have fallen on this particular dark tale, but it has been well and truly raised on a new talent who looks set to be entertaining and moving us for many decades to come.
Publishers Weekly
Spanning decades, the ambitious final volume of Thriller Award–winner Smith’s trilogy set in the Soviet Union (after 2009’s The Secret Speech and 2008’s Child 44) takes former KGB agent Leo Demidov from Moscow to Manhattan via a gripping, relentless whodunit plot. In 1950, the Soviet authorities plan to exploit the arrival in Moscow of Jesse Austin, a Paul Robeson–like American singer and dedicated Communist, for propaganda purposes, but Austin’s refusal to play along creates complications. The full implications of Austin’s behavior don’t become apparent until the action shifts to 1965, when Demidov’s wife and two adolescent daughters travel to New York City as part of a delegation intended to ease cold war tensions, and tragedy ensues. Most readers will reach the final page with regret and in awe of Smith’s uncompromising vision of the realities of a police state and the toll it takes on those caught in its meshes. (Jan.)
The Scotsman
A new talent who looks set to be entertaining and moving us for many decades to come.
Booklist
In [the] first two volumes, Smith brilliantly illuminated the horrors of Stalin's Russia and the Gulag. He also gave readers Leo Demidov, duty-bound, introspective, enduring, and ultimately a figure both tragic and heroic...another first-class, must-read crime novel.
Library Journal
Fortified by formidable details of Soviet history, Smith's closing volume of the Leo Demidov trilogy (Child 44; The Secret Speech) knits together iconic characters and elements as Leo for 30 years inexorably seeks justice. In a devastating tragedy in 1965, his wife is killed while on a Cold War public relations trip to Manhattan, but Leo is denied any chance to investigate. He is assigned as a police adviser in Afghanistan, where events make it possible for him to get to New York. Though weary, he works to find out the truth behind Raisa's death. VERDICT Fans of Smith's first two books will avidly seek out the final chapter, though this one stands on its own as well. The Afghan interlude is a searing echo of today's headlines, while the buildup of suspense over several decades is the armchair equivalent of a jaw-jarringly extreme ride at an amusement park. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/11.]—Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA
Kirkus Reviews
Political whodunit author Smith (Child 44, 2008, etc.) returns with more intrigue from behind the old Iron Curtain. Actually, a good chunk of the intrigue occurs on this side of the Atlantic. Leo Demidov is a loyal functionary, a good servant of the state and its apparatus, "a decorated soldier recruited to the ranks of the secret police after the Great Patriotic War." He is also sensitive to the Orwellian implications of his job, aware that open sedition isn't always the thing to look out for; more important are the incomplete or insincere expressions of love for the Great Leader and the system. Naturally, under such a regime even the most loyal of servants falls under suspicion, and on that point some of Smith's taut tale hinges on the introduction of some key players. One is an African-American singer named Jesse Austin, transparently modeled on Paul Robeson, who, "unlike many Negro singers," as one apparatchik dryly puts it, is unreligious--or better, "Communism is his church." When Austin falls to an assassin in New York, Demidov's wife, Raisa, traveling there on a cultural mission, is implicated, thanks in good part to a loyal cop on the capitalist side of the Wall, an FBI man who specializes in "nonlegal harassment" of suspected Communists and fellow travelers. Demidov is stymied when his controllers deny him permission to dig into the truth--and, nonlegally, he takes matters into his own hands, which puts him in some of the more precarious corners of the world, not least of them Afghanistan. Smith's tale spans years and continents, and the period details are exactly right even as he spins out an old-fashioned thriller that would do Ludlum and le Carré proud. The story is a little long, but it has a nicely creepy and--yes--Orwellian ending that amply repays the occasional detour in getting there. A big book, in every sense, that's sure to draw attention.
