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SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Stalin's Ghost
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Moscow-based Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, in his outstanding sixth outing (after Wolves Eat Dogs), investigates a murder-for-hire scheme that leads him to suspect two fellow police detectives, Nikolai Isakov and Marat Urman, both former members of Russia's elite Black Berets, who served in Chechnya. Isakov, a war hero, is now running for public office. Renko must also look into reports that the ghost of Stalin has begun appearing on subway platforms and why several bodies of Black Berets who served in Chechnya with Isakov have turned up in the morgue. Despite repeated threats to his life, Renko stubbornly perseveres, seeking justice in a land that has no official notion of that concept. Smith eschews vertiginous twists and surprises, concentrating instead on Renko as he slowly and patiently builds his case until the pieces fall together and he has again, if not exactly triumphed, at least survived. This masterful suspense novel casts a searing light on contemporary Russia.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
His sixth Arkady Renko novel in 26 years, Martin Cruz Smith has produced a suspenseful page-turner packed full of vivid characters, clever dialogue, and hair-raising plot twists. In addition to a gripping mystery, readers will embrace the detailed, harrowing descriptions of the harshness and violence of life in the "New Russia." Critics unanimously praised Smith's sobering depiction of contemporary, post-Communist Russia; indeed, the country emerges as a character in its own right. The Wall Street Journal complained of implausible story lines and the questionable nature of Renko's career choices, but most critics were delighted to see Arkady Renko back in action. Readers will no doubt share their enthusiasm.
-- Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Wolves Eat Dogs
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The terminally melancholic Russian investigator Arkady Renko, whose cynicism is perpetually at war with his need to dig a little deeper, was last seen five years ago in Havana, where the rusting idealism of post-Soviet Cuba mirrored the detective's ravaged inner life. Leave it to Cruz Smith to find an even more evocative setting for the battered Renko: the Zone of Exclusion, the dreaded no-man's land around Chernobyl, an officially abandoned, contaminated area where a bizarre assortment of stubborn Ukrainians, crazed entrepreneurs, and determined researchers continue to live in the shadow of Reactor Four, the "sarcophagus," site of the world 's worst nuclear accident. The case that takes Renko to Chernobyl involves the death of Pasha Ivanov, a billionaire businessman, symbol of the New Russia. Why would such a man commit suicide, jumping from the window of his Moscow apartment, and why was his closet floor covered with salt? Renko, the perennial outsider whose career is officially on the skids ("Some men march confidently from one historical era to another; others skid"), is assigned the simple task of sweeping the suicide under the rug, but naturally, he does the opposite, obsessed by the seemingly inexplicable salt and determined, as always, to keep digging no matter how loudly the bureaucrats scream. Perhaps that's why Renko feels oddly comfortable in Chernobyl: the bureaucrats are out of earshot in a surreal shadow world where the dosimeters (to measure radiation) provide the backbeat for a grayed-out version of life just this side of The Twilight Zone. Even more than Havana Bay, this novel demonstrates Cruz Smith's remarkable ability to meld character with landscape, and if Renko seems to find a shred of hope in the end, we know not to turn our dosimeters off quite yet. -- Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Smith's melancholy, indefatigable Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has been exiled to some bitter venues in the past—including blistering-hot Cuba in Havana Bay and the icy Bering sea in Polar Star—but surely the strangest (and most fascinating) is his latest, the eerie, radioactive landscape of post-meltdown Chernobyl. Renko is called in to investigate the 10-story, plunge-to-the-pavement death of Pasha Ivanov, fabulously wealthy president of Moscow's NoviRus corporation, whose death is declared a suicide by Renko's boss, Prosecutor Zurin. Renko, being Renko, isn't sure it's suicide and wonders about little details like the bloody handprints on the windowsill and the curious matter of the closet filled with 50 kilos of salt. And why is NoviRus's senior vice-president Lev Timofeyev's nose bleeding? Renko asks too many questions, so an annoyed Zurin sends him off to Chernobyl to investigate when Timofeyev turns up in the cemetery in a small Ukrainian town with his throat slit and his face chewed on by wolves. The cemetery lies within the dangerously radioactive 30-kilometer circle called the Zone of Exclusion, populated by a contingent of scientists, a detachment of soldiers and those—the elderly, the crooks, the demented—who have sneaked back to live in abandoned houses and apartments. The secret of Ivanov and Timofeyev's deaths lies somewhere in the Zone, and the dogged Renko, surrounded by wolves both animal and human, refuses to leave until he unravels the mystery. It's the Zone itself and the story of Chernobyl that supplies the riveting backbone of this novel. Renko races around the countryside on his Uralmoto motorcycle, listening always to the ominous ticking of his dosimeter as it counts the dangerous levels of radioactivity present in the food, the soil, the air and the people themselves as they lie, cheat, love, steal, kill and die.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
December 6
From Library
Journal
Well loved and well regarded, Smith (Havana Bay) opens his new
thriller on the day before Pearl Harbor erupts in a wall of flames. Harry
Niles, whose fluency in Japanese idioms of culture and language was honed
for years as a missionary brat, knows that there is just one chance for
him to leave Japan before war breaks out. A wheeler-dealer of the first
order, he must extricate himself from the love affairs, vendettas,
investigations, and outright cons that he has perpetrated over the years.
Strongly suspected of being a spy by both Japan and the United States,
Harry plays both sides against the middle but only up to the point that he
can preserve his own honor and sense of what is right. Readers will love
not only Harry but also his opponents, pillow partners, and allies. The
pace is like a bullet train, the characters are limned far beyond the
usual stereotype, and the locale is as evocative as the cherry blossom
itself.
--
Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 2002 Cahners
Business Information.
From Kirkus Reviews
War-ready Japan becomes as nostalgically wonderful as the doomed central
Europe of Alan Furst in the latest masterwork from the author of Gorky
Park. The gripping pleasure that put Smith (Havana Bay, 1999, etc.)
at the top of Cold War-era thriller lists was his detailed and utterly
believable revelation of Moscow as a weary city full of real people. Here,
it's Tokyo-on December 6, 1941. Smith's guide to the tinderbox megalopolis
is Harry Niles, an American supposedly in the care of his drunken uncle
(the only iffy premise) while his missionary parents beat the bushes for
potential Baptists. As a gaijin-foreigner-Harry is the permanent victim of
his schoolboy chums in their re-creations of samurai sagas. The games may
be imaginary, but the beatings are real, and Harry gains legendary
survival skills along with the language and cultural understanding of a
native. December 6 finds him the owner of Happy Paris, a nightclub
featuring the d.j. skills of Michiko, a Modern Girl as thoroughly
independent and wily as the cynical Harry. The pair's prickly relationship
is complicated by Harry's occasional wanderings with the code-breaking
wife of a fatuous British peer and by the mortally frightening news that
Colonel Ishigami, whom Harry caused to lose face as Ishigami was removing
heads in Manchuria, is in town and looking for him. He's not alone.
Harry's tormenting childhood friends have grown up, one of them making it
into the inner circle of Admiral Yamamoto, and they too appear to have
plans for Harry, whose own fate may narrow down to getting out of Tokyo
before the balloon goes up. At the heart of Harry's problems is the little
bit of bogus intelligence he's slipped into the military
machinery in an effort to forestall the war that would inevitably
obliterate the adopted country he loves so passionately. Intelligent,
jazzy, romantic, unbelievably tense, completely absorbing. Worth the wait.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Havana Bay
The New York Times
Book Review, Carl
Hiaasen
It's a richly
intricate mystery, made more compelling by its setting.
The Wall Street
Journal, Joe Dizney
...Mr. Smith delivers another fine entry in an enjoyable series of spy
novels and an excellent contender for the year's steamiest beach read.
The New York Times,
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
As readers of the previous books well know, Smith has been extremely
adept at summoning up the seedy, melancholy Russian milieu in which Arkady
operates. In Havana Bay, he does something similar for post-Soviet
Cuba.... worthwhile reading, no matter how glutinous the plot.
From Booklist , April
15, 1999
It was inevitable somehow that Arkady Renko, hero of Gorky Park,
would find his way to Cuba. As Russian as he is cynical, as disgusted with
the capitalistic excesses of the new Russia as he was with the bungling
bureaucracy of the Communists, the melancholy Renko, now suicidal after
the tragic death of his lover, Irina, comes to Havana to help his longtime
friend General Pribluda, but he arrives just as the general's body is
being pulled from the bay. But is it really Pribluda? Renko won't make a
positive identification, and soon enough unknown forces are trying to kill
him, unaware that if they had just waited a little longer, Arkady would
have done the job himself. Instead, the attempt on his life rejuvenates
the woebegone investigator ("I don't mind a car hitting me, but I do
mind a driver trying to hit me"). The Renko series has always
lived on irony--a cop who cares about truth working in a system designed
to distort it--and this installment is perhaps the most heavily ironic
yet: Renko, in a country where Russians are now despised for selling out
socialism, again struggling simultaneously against both an unyielding
bureaucracy and the chaotic forces that would overthrow it--and working
with a feisty female cop who is the mirror image of the young Renko in Gorky
Park. Smith's beautifully evoked Cuba--rusting idealism set against
resurgent decadence--makes the perfect foil for a melancholic truth-seeker
whose determination masks the best irony of all: he doesn't particularly
believe in the very things he seeks to defend. Readers who respond to the
browbeaten detectives in our "Hard-Boiled Gazetteer to the British
Isles" (p.1456) will love Renko.
-- Bill Ott
Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
The welcome return of one of the two (along with George Smiley) most
memorable characters in modern thrillers. Arkady Renko, the smart, humane,
often despairing but idealistic and persistent Moscow detective introduced
in Gorky Park (1981) and brought back in Polar Star (1989) and Red Square
(1992) is still attempting to nail the bad guys. But in chaotic postSoviet
Russia, a world where the villains seem to be proliferating, his job keeps
getting harder. Still reeling from a personal tragedy (likely to unsettle
devoted readers of the series), Arkady seizes the opportunity to leave
Moscow for a brief trip to Havana. His old acquaintance Pribluda, a KGB
bureaucrat, has apparently turned up dead in the harbor. But is it
Pribluda? The body is too decayed to allow definite identification. The
Cubans, struggling to survive in a world without the Soviet Union, have a
barely restrained loathing for Russians and no great interest in
investigating the death. Arkady, whos contemplating suicide and feeling
useless and lost, is energizedhours after having entered Cubaby an attempt
on his life. He manages to kill his attacker, thereby becoming a figure of
considerable interest to the small Russian diplomatic community and
various factions in the Cuban government. With the help of Ofelia Osorio,
a bright, competent, maverick policewoman, Arkady begins to sort out the
tangled threads of the case. Smith has always demonstrated a genius for
detail, and his powers are working at their peak here; his portraits of a
threadbare, vibrant Havana, the various classes in Castro's classless
Cuba, and the resilient, sardonic Cuban response to an impoverished
existence, are vivid, assured, and convincing. Smith has also always had a
genius for complex conspiracies, and the one that Arkady and Ofelia
uncover is typically audacious and believable. The climax, as Arkady
struggles for his life in the waters of Havana Bay, is masterfully paced.
A strong, satisfying addition to one of the most memorable and
idiosyncratic series of modern thrillers. (Book-of-the-Month Club main
selection; Author tour)
-- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All
rights reserved.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR
Rose
The New York Times
Book Review, Eugene Weber
Martin Cruz Smith
has demonstrated his cunning and his fondness for thick atmosphere before
in his novels Red Square and Gorky Park. He has a way with
words and with anachronism.... Mr. Smith's tale is smartly told, engaging
and worth reading.
From Booklist , March
15, 1996
In Gorky Park (1981), Polar Star (1989), and other
richly detailed novels, Martin Cruz Smith has taken readers to places they
couldn't otherwise go. Typically, they are dark, hellish places where what
passes for society strikes comfortable readers as codified savagery. In Rose,
set in 1872, he takes us to Wigan, a coal-rich suburb of Hell located in
Lancashire, England. Mining engineer Jonathan Blair wants only to return
to Africa, but his sponsor, coal baron and Anglican bishop Hannay, who
funds African explorations, coerces him into going to Wigan to investigate
the disappearance of a young curate who was engaged to Hannay's daughter.
Blair--and the reader--are assaulted by the soot-covered coal-mining
center where, for everyone but the Hannays, life is brutish and short.
Blair's investigation antagonizes miners, mine supervisors, and the
bishop's splenetic daughter, but when he falls in love with a "pit
girl" named Rose, the antagonisms turn deadly. Rose has
everything a compelling novel needs: Blair is a fascinating protagonist,
by turns a hero and a boor; other significant characters are complex and
as multifaceted as a chunk of coal; the mystery is gripping. But it is the
horrific, mesmerizing portrayal of the dark, hellish Wigan, the mines
themselves, and the lives of miners that makes this novel much more than a
good read.
--Thomas Gaughan
Copyright© 1996, American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this
title.
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