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The Secret Speech Tom Rob Smith Books

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The Secret Speech Tom Rob Smith Books

Leo Demidov is back! from Tom Rob Smith’s fantastic first novel Child 44. The Secret Speech has all the historical context combined with pulse pounding action of its predecessor. For the most part it is just as spectacular.

What do I mean by “For the most part”? The first part of the novel leaves you breathless and exhausted. The plot is left unresolved, but the book should be over. Then…. It starts up again and it is literally too much. Add to that the villain starts to display incredible powers like some kind of superhero, er, supervillain. Everything goes completely overboard.

So, for the most part, The Secret Speech is fantastic but ultimately it suffers from overkill. That said, will I go ahead and read the third installment, Agent 6? Of course, I wouldn’t miss it.


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The Secret Speech Tom Rob Smith Books Reviews

I was thrilled to see I could continue to live in Leo's world a bit longer.

The Secret Speech is not as fantastically compelling as Child 44 but it is a worthy follow-up and certainly worth your reading energies.

Time has moved into the 50's and Russia's new government has made a statement condemning the harsh ways the citizens were treated by the police in the past. The relationship between the police force and the society they oversee now teeters on the edge of eruption.

This book moves from the secret arrests, harsh interrogations and unfair detentions of Child 44 to the Siberian gulags where these detainees were sent. The fact that these were a way of life for a country for decades is a frightening thought. We spend much time with Leo's family in this book and come to know his daughters and wife much better. They are great characters and their stories are compelling, exciting and suspenseful.

The length of these books has been welcome -- they are intricate and tell amazing stories; however, I feel the end of this novel is the end of this story. I did not feel the "back cover" of the final book of the trilogy sounded interesting or even necessary for Leo's story.

This is an author to set alerts for...Child 44 and The Secret Speech are amazing!
Just finished reading this book. I found the violent revolutionary scenes rather surrealistic and that it was not easy for me to imagine the scenarios. What Leo Demidov and his wife went through seems an impossible set of scenarios even with the wildest stretch of the imagination. Survival is really impossible. Too far-fetched for my liking. The writer is really knowledgeable about the background of the Kruschev era in the Soviet Union and the lack of trust that people had for each other. Smith's previous book Child 44 was a far better read. The scenarios boggled the imagination so much that it actually deterred me as the reader from really getting into the content of the story.
It is hard to pinpoint why I felt disappointed in the trilogy. I think the main issue was the sheer number of seemingly insuperable problems overcome by the various characters. The picture of Stalinist Russia seemed very accurate, the characters suitably complex, and at least for Child 44 based on considerable reality. It just seemed that Leo escaped too many times from catastrophic situations, and in this particular book I admit to being at odds with how Lazar and his wife behaved. Parts seemed too much like an action movie, as though the author had such a project in mind. Maybe also part of the point of the book was not to have any sympathy for Leo or his wife, or for Zoya in particular. While I could "understand" her brief joy at being with the criminals, her rather sudden attachment, and the returned affection, a la Romeo and Juliet, while likely true of young teenagers, rang a bit like Bonnie and Clyde ending up "reformed". Yes, teenagers are volatile. Yes, they do stupid things to themselves and others. But Malysh was a real killer, and it seemed, given the circumstance in the bedroom, Zoya would have become more like him. I think better read are Gorky Park and the other books about Renko.
I was told I was wrong for appreciating the first of Tom Rob Smith's trilogy, Child 44, so I decided to allow my self the guilty pleasure of reading the second installment The Secret Speech and I found I was once again in the wrong, because I quite liked it. Smith certainly knows how to spin an exciting tale. In The Secret Speech we once again meet Leo Demidov and his wife, Raisa. Their relationship has matured over the years and Leo is currently working as a homicide detective. He and Raisa have adopted two orphaned sisters and Leo struggles to develop a positive relationship with them.

Smith always does his homework and the reader is lucky to learn about Khrushchev's secret speech and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. But do keep in mind that this is a popular suspense fiction not meant to be enlightened.

It is exciting and I had trouble putting it down. I loved following Leo's journey from Moscow to Siberia to Hungary.

I don't recommend this for the highbrow reader but for the suspense reader. If you enjoyed Child 44, I encourage you to continue the trilogy.
On February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The speech, which was formally titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” criticized Josef Stalin, his prosecution of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), his multiple purges of the armed forces and party leadership, and other politically driven crimes against the Soviet people.

Tom Rob Smith uses Khrushchev’s speech as his point of departure in The Secret Speech, the second volume in his Child 44 trilogy. The question it ponders is this When the State becomes criminal, can criminals exact justice? As always, Leo Demidov is at the center of the action, traveling from Moscow to Kolyma to Budapest to uncover the truth and protect himself and his family in the process. As with Smith’s other volumes in this series, the pacing is swift and the plot twists are sharp.

Highly recommended, but read the books in order of the series!
Leo Demidov is back! from Tom Rob Smith’s fantastic first novel Child 44. The Secret Speech has all the historical context combined with pulse pounding action of its predecessor. For the most part it is just as spectacular.

What do I mean by “For the most part”? The first part of the novel leaves you breathless and exhausted. The plot is left unresolved, but the book should be over. Then…. It starts up again and it is literally too much. Add to that the villain starts to display incredible powers like some kind of superhero, er, supervillain. Everything goes completely overboard.

So, for the most part, The Secret Speech is fantastic but ultimately it suffers from overkill. That said, will I go ahead and read the third installment, Agent 6? Of course, I wouldn’t miss it.