Rating: 5 out of 5

This is a dark and menacing book describing a very dark and menacing time. It is very well written and incredibly transportative. On at least one occasion I found myself grabbing my husband by the hand to make sure he was still there beside me. I’ve read, heard stories and seen films about this period. None have made me feel the threat of being guilty of something even if the authorities don’t know what it is yet as this one has. It is also a good thriller too keeping the pages being turned long after I should have been asleep.

I suspect some aspects of this story will stay with me for a while.

Highlighted passages:

Better to let ten innocent men suffer than one spy escape. He’d disregarded a fundamental principle of their work: the presumption of guilt.

The duty of an investigator was to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered then they hadn’t scratched deep enough.

Terror protected the Revolution. Without it, Lenin would’ve fallen. Without it, Stalin would’ve fallen.

Fear was cultivated. Fear was part of his job. And for this level of fear to be sustained it needed a constant supply of people fed to it.

The survival of their political system justified anything. The promise of a golden age where none of this brutality would exist, where everything would be in plenty and poverty would be a memory, justified anything.

the country didn’t need poets, philosophers and priests. It needed productivity that could be measured and quantified, success that could be timed with a stopwatch.

For decades no one had taken action according to what they believed was right or wrong but by what they thought would please their leader.

Suspects released because they were innocent–who’d heard of such a thing?

Her job was not only to toe the line but to shut down her pupils’ questioning faculties.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account