Red Children’s Shoes
A psychological and social noir
Across a European capital, pairs of red children’s shoes begin appearing.
- Outside a courthouse.
- Outside a government building.
- Outside a private home.
- At places where someone once got away with something.
No organization claims them. No one leads them. Every pair points back to a story someone thought had been buried.
It begins with a killing
Twelve-year-old Aurora witnesses a woman being stabbed in a city park. Her father, Antonio, soon discovers that knowing what happened and being able to prove it are very different things.
Detective Viktor is trying to establish the truth inside a system where information does not always remain where it should. Journalist Emil begins asking his own questions. Around them are lawyers, officials and men with enough influence to make a problem disappear without ever putting an order in writing.
Then the red shoes begin to appear.
What starts with one crime spreads into something the institutions surrounding it cannot easily classify, explain or control. The shoes have no spokesperson, no headquarters and no list of demands. They simply keep appearing, and every pair asks the same uncomfortable question.
What happened here?
The novel
Red Children’s Shoes is a character-driven psychological and social noir about power, protection, complicity, family and the distance between an event and the version of it that survives.
Its characters experience the same events from different positions and with different loyalties. A father wants to protect his daughter. A detective wants evidence. A journalist wants the truth made public. Others have reasons for wanting certain questions to disappear.
Their decisions begin colliding long before any of them understands where those decisions will lead.
Red Children’s Shoes is Adrian Klein’s current novel.