Inspector Arkady Renko was first introduced to us in Gorky Park back in 1981. Interestingly this is only his eighth outing. The style has changed a bit over the years, this is faster, more staccato, and yet still remains wordy and the setting remains as complex and atmospheric as ever. Once again Renko is after the Russian mafia, here with a coded notebook at the plot’s centre and a race-against-time to reveal its secrets. You do not need to have read any of the previous books to enjoy this one. It’s brilliant.
In his groundbreaking Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith created one of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko. In Tatiana, Smith delivers his most ambitious and politically daring novel since. When the brilliant and fearless young reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow in the same week that notorious mob billionaire Grisha Grigorenko is shot in the back of the head, Renko finds himself on the trail of a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia itself. The body of an elite government translator shows up on the sand dunes of Kalingrad: killed for nothing but a cryptic notebook filled with symbols. A frantic hunt begins to locate and decipher this notebook. In a fast-changing and lethal race to uncover what this translator knew, and how he planned to reveal it to the world, Renko makes a startling discovery that propels him deeper into Tatiana's past - and, at the same time, paradoxically, into Russia's future.
Martin Cruz Smith’s novels include Gorky Park, Stallion Gate, Polar Star, Red Square, Rose, Havana Bay and Stalin’s Ghost. A recipient of the CWA Gold Dagger for fiction in the UK, he is also two-time winner of the Hammett Prize in the United States. He lives with his wife and children in northern California.
