<\/p>\n
\n
Winston Churchill famously described Russia as \u201ca riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crime novels of Martin Cruz Smith dive into that tantalizing congeries as they present a wide-ranging, richly-textured portrait of the ailing, corrupt Soviet Union collapsing and slowly turning into an even more corrupt, money-mad Russian kleptocracy.<\/p>\n
The touchstone for all this upheaval is the cynical, battered hero Arkady Renko. Renko should have risen much higher than he has as a police inspector, because his father was a famous general in The Great Patriotic War (WWII). But he disobeys orders, won\u2019t cut corners, and won\u2019t accept cover-ups. In other words: he\u2019s honest. It hasn\u2019t done him any good in the old order and it\u2019s even less helpful in the new one where everything is for sale. In fact, it almost gets him killed more than once.<\/p>\n
His case in this novel sends him to Siberia in search of his testy journalist girlfriend Tatiana who\u2019s risking her life researching a story about oligarchs and oil–and much more than she\u2019s let him know about. Siberia is \u201cwhere strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner…It was a zone on the edge where planes of existence overlapped. Nothing was inexplicable.\u201d<\/p>\n
But everything<\/em> is potentially lethal. When Arkady lands in the grim Siberian city of Chita, the chatty cab driver laughingly warns him, \u201cDon\u2019t go by first impressions. It gets worse. A few days ago an oil tanker on a train headed to Moscow exploded two kilometers from the station. It went up in flames for no good reason. They say you could have seen the blast from the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n Renko asks if that happens often there and the driver says, \u201cIt\u2019s Chita. Anything can happen.\u201d And anything does<\/em>, as Arkady is the subject of more violence in this book than ever before in the series, or perhaps more accurately, violence unlike anything he could have imagined.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve read all of the Renko novels at least twice and some of them three times, in part because they\u2019re beautifully written, but not in such a way as to interfere with the narrative. Each word serves the story, as in these quietly ominous lines from Three Stations<\/em>: \u201cYegor\u2019s name was like a drop of ink in water. Everything took a darker shade.\u201d<\/p>\n Line by line he\u2019s also one of the funniest novelists we have, and Renko\u2019s sly insolence when dealing with his nasty boss Zurin is one of the highlights of the series. Their barbed relationship doesn\u2019t prepare you, though, for a shocking request Zurin makes near the end of the book that could not only change Renko\u2019s life but change the course of Russian history. And while the characters may be fictional, their prototypes are not.<\/p>\n \u201cBrilliant\u201d may be an over-used word for reviewers, and so is \u201cstunning\u201d–but both of them fit. There\u2019s more to say than that, however. Martin Cruz Smith has been writing an epic history of contemporary Russia that should have earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature by now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Winston Churchill famously described Russia as \u201ca riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.\u201d The crime novels of Martin Cruz Smith dive into that tantalizing congeries as they present a wide-ranging, richly-textured portrait of the ailing, corrupt Soviet Union collapsing and slowly turning into an even more corrupt, money-mad Russian kleptocracy. The touchstone for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8269"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8271,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8269\/revisions\/8271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}