Agent 6 (The Child 44 Trilogy)

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012: To solve the murder that splintered his family, ex-KGB officer Leo Demidov escapes the ruins of Stalinist Russia through opium-soaked 1980s Afghanistan to New York's underbelly. Smith secures his place in the pantheon of crime writers with this taut, enthralling conclusion to the trilogy he brilliantly began with Child 44 and The Secret Speech. --Mari Malcolm