Detective Arkady Renko has starred in eleven crime novels, beginning of course with Gorky Park. Many of us grew up learning about life inside Russia from these books. The most recent thriller, HOTEL UKRAINE, is set shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Martin Cruz Smith, one of the most respected crime novelists in the world, is living with Parkinson’s Disease, and he has bravely chosen to present the aging Renko with the same condition. Still at his Moscow desk, the policeman is sent by Prosecutor General Zurin to the formal Hotel Ukraine. The body of Alexei Kazasky, the deputy minister of defence, lies here, stabbed and beaten. Renko conceals his illness from all but his most loyal colleague, Viktor, and goes about interviewing the witnesses and family with his usual sharp eye for discrepancies. Unfortunately, the invasion means that the crime has to be considered political, so Marina Makarova of the FSB is also assigned.

Supportive characters include Arkady’s adopted son, the chess wizard and computer hacker Zhenya, and partner, brave journalist Tatiana Petrovna, first met in the novel Tatiana. This lady continues to flout rules and danger by trying to expose evil and corruption for the New York Times. There is a lot of evil going on these days.

Tatiana and Arkady both find links to a Russian paramilitary group led by Ivan Volkov and his father Lev Volkov. Mercenaries were responsible for atrocities that happened in Bucha, Ukraine, and our characters go there to gather evidence. Zhenya is working against the invasion from his desk, secretly, and trying to avoid conscription. The scale of the conflicts and crimes in HOTEL UKRAINE is larger than ever, moving across free European countries that do not wish to return to behind an Iron Curtain. 

With this memorable cast and the constant drip of menace, this is a tightly written, tense crime story, demonstrating how evidence is gathered, fact-checked and stored on computers nowadays. Many allusions to actual events show that real life can be stranger than any fiction. Nobody might have expected a father and daughter in Britain to be poisoned by Russian agents, but it happened. By demonstrating the toxic, entrenched hierarchy in Moscow and the resistance of modern youth, Martin Cruz Smith is showing us where to place the blame. HOTEL UKRAINE is stated to be the final Arkady Renko book, and I already feel I’m missing a friend.