TATIANA Martin Cruz Smith

TATIANA Martin Cruz Smith

Overview:

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.”

“It would be a treat to watch the evening news with Martin Cruz Smith’s fabulist’s eye and see current events colorized through Renko’s dramatic filter. In Tatiana, Smith continues the tradition he began at the end of the Brezhnev era with Gorky Park, using Russia as his game board to make geopolitical conspiracy, well . . . fun. Tatiana ought to come with a decoder ring so readers who share the author’s fondness for brainteasers can try to crack the translator’s code on their own. Then again, struggling slowly from benighted dread into the glimmering dawn of fictional resolution is the reward of reading an Arkady Renko thriller. Figuring everything out too quickly would only spoil the game.”
(Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review)

“Riveting . . . Smith spins a complex plot involving the Russian mafia, a teenage genius struggling to crack the code of Petrovna’s notebook, and an excursion to Kaliningrad. . . . The most intriguing 'character' after Renko is contemporary Russia—freer than it was at the height of the cold war, but at least as corrupt and vastly more unequal—into which Smith offers many insights.”
(Publishers Weekly (starred review))

“Smith is a master storyteller, delivering sharp dialogue, a tight plot, memorable descriptions and an understated hero in Arkady Renko. Anyone who enjoys crime novels but hasn’t read Smith is in for a treat.”
(Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

“A continuing adventure that in terms of popular fiction is surely a work of art.”
(Washington Post)

“The sustained success of Smith’s Renko books is based on much more than Renko. This author’s gift for tart, succinct description creates a poisonous political backdrop, one that makes his characters’ survival skills as important as any of their other attributes. . . . [This is] one top-flight series, still sharply honed, none the worse for wear.”
(New York Times)

“What ultimately sets the Renko books apart is the careful writing, and, more important, the knowledge of the human heart that is carried through it, through them, first to last.”
(Chicago Tribune)

"All novels should be as dark and mysterious and entertaining as Three Stations; all series should be so consistently excellent; all prose should be so dazzling; and all writers so talented as Martin Cruz Smith."
(The Denver Post) 
 

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And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!