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.