TATIANA, a powerful novel in the Arkady Renko series,
sets the globetrotting Russian policeman back in Moscow.
Tatiana is a journalist who selflessly exposes the plentiful
corruption at the heart of the new state. Currently she
stands in the way of developers. Everyone expects that it's
only a matter of time until she's killed. When the
inevitable happens, the death is officially marked down as
suicide.
Renko visits a protest march by the journalist's friends,
and the bully-boy police tactics used against the
intellectuals don't do him any good. Recently recovered
from a shooting incident, he's feeling older and knows he's
fragile. Maybe the new Russia, with its gangsters and
billionaires moving in and out of politics, is too brutal
for him to keep on making trouble.
The contrasting characters include Renko's adopted son
Zhenya, a chess wizard who is disaffected and wants to join
the army against Renko's better judgement; Maxim, a
literary type hoping for recognition as a poet; Joseph
Bonnafos, a Swiss translator; Alexi, a gangster; Ludmilla,
Tatiana's reclusive sister; and to add a modern celebrity
layer, Abdul, a rap artist. A good cast is half the story.
The translator is killed and his indecipherable notebook
stolen in a town called Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast,
famed for amber mines. Tatiana had met this man shortly
before both of their deaths - by investigating one death,
Renko is looking into both... and making vicious enemies.
I've been thinking for some years that the popular hero has
shifted from the white-hatted sheriff, through the police
detective, to the investigative journalist. We appear to
need a hero to expose wrongdoing and protect society, and
the modern media now fill that role for many of us, in
reality or in fiction. No surprise then, that even as
author Martin Cruz Smith shows us that in modern Russia, the
more things change, the more things stay the same. I never
cease to be impressed by the new lights that this highly
original author shines through out-of-the way windows.
TATIANA, the eighth book about iconic Investigator Renko is
relentlessly gritty, whether in a Moscow apartment or a
spit of sand on the Baltic coast. As the master of modern
crime, Martin Cruz Smith brings his settings, romances and
dangers to life in deceptively spare prose. TATIANA will be
devoured by his fans and will make many new friends.
Arkady Renko, one of the iconic investigators of
contemporary fiction, has survived the cultural journey from
the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find the nation
as obsessed with secrecy and brutality as was the old
Communist dictatorship. In Tatiana, the melancholy
hero— cynical, analytical, and quietly subversive— unravels
a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia itself.
The fearless reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her
death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow the same week that
a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigo-renko, is shot and buried
with the trappings due a lord. No one else makes the
connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he
discovers of Tatiana’s voice describing horrific crimes in
words that are at odds with the Kremlin’s official versions.
The trail leads to Kaliningrad, a Cold War “secret
city” that is separated by hundreds of miles from the rest
of Russia. The more Arkady delves into Tatiana’s past, the
more she leads him into a surreal world of wandering sand
dunes, abandoned children, and a notebook written in the
personal code of a dead translator. Finally, in a lethal
race to uncover what the translator knew, Arkady makes a
startling discovery that draws him still deeper into
Tatiana’s past—and, paradoxically, into Russia’s future,
where bulletproof cars, poets, corruption of the Baltic
Fleet, and a butcher for hire combine to give Kaliningrad
the “distinction” of having the highest crime rate in
Russia.
More than a mystery, Tatiana is
Martin Cruz Smith’s most ambitious and politically daring
novel since Gorky Park. It is a story rich in
character, black humor, and romance, with an insight that is
the hallmark of a writer the New York Times has
called “endlessly entertaining and deeply serious . . . [not
merely] our best writer of suspense, but one of our best
writers, period.”
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