Tatiana: Martin Cruz Smith

In late April, I read Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith, the eighth book in the Arkady Renko series. This is sort of a police procedural set in Russia; I say this because Arkady is a police investigator, still working for the Procurator in Moscow, but really going his own way in an unsupervised investigation. So there is not much procedure involved. 

Journalist Tatiana Petrovna has fallen from a six story building in Moscow and the death has been ruled suicide. Arkady is concerned because her body has disappeared, and then later the body reappears and is immediately cremated. The authorities are trying to conceal the truth of her death.

Tatiana was investigating a plot involving the Mafia and Russian officials. One of her sources was the interpreter who wrote up the notes of a meeting of mafia bosses in a code that is supposedly unbreakable. The interpreter gave the coded notebook to Tatiana. After her death, the notebook gets into the hands of Zhenya, a gifted teenager who is Arkady's ward. Zhenya and his new girlfriend are trying to solve the code with their expertise in chess and puzzles.

And that is just a small part of the plot. It is very complex and at times it is hard to tell who can be trusted and who is a foe. As often happens in mysteries, there are just too many characters to keep track of. However, that was a minor problem in this story. 

My thoughts:

I like the setting in Russia. This book was published in 2013 and I think it represents what Russia was like at the time. There is corruption and violence everywhere. 

I also enjoyed learning about Kaliningrad, an exclave of Russia bordered by Lithuania and Poland. It was formerly Konigsberg, part of Germany and was annexed to Russia by the Potsdam Agreement in 1945. A good portion of the book, maybe half, was set in that area. It is a coastal city, the only ice-free Russian port on the Baltic Sea.

It took me about half the way into the book to get invested in the story, which, as I remember it, was true of earlier books in the series. But it was so good; it got better and better as I was reading it.

It took a while to get to know the characters. There are a lot of them. Even with as many books as I had read in the series, I still find Arkady Renko a mystery, not sure what he is seeking in life. I don't think he knows either. I like Sergeant Victor Orlov, the detective he works with, who is in a difficult position, trying to support and help Arkady, yet not get in trouble with his superiors. However, once the story got moving and I understood more about the diverse characters, the book had me hooked. 

I read the previous 7 books in the series, but I read them between 2005 and 2021, so I have forgotten a lot. Therefore, I am pretty sure that you can read most of the books as standalones. Maybe the first three books (Gorky Park, Polar Star, and Red Square) should be read in order, because they lead up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another similar series that I have read is Stuart Kaminsky's Porfiry Rostnikov series, also about a policeman in Moscow.