Arkady Renko #8
Simon & Schuster
November 2013
On Sale: November 12, 2013
312 pages ISBN: 1439140219 EAN: 9781439140215 Kindle: B00BSA5MV8 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
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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