Great

I'm repeatedly surprised that I like Martin Cruz Smith's so well. The arcane Russian detective, plodding through another mystery that few others are willing to even recognize as a crime. But he draws me in every time. ( )

Arkady Renko, uno de los investigadores icónicos de la ficción contemporánea, ha sobrevivido a la travesía cultural desde la Unión Soviética hasta la Nueva Rusia sólo para encontrarse con una nación tan obsesionada con el secretismo y la brutalidad como durante la dictadura comunista. En Tatiana, desentraña un misterio tan complejo y peligroso como la Rusia moderna.
La temeraria periodista Tatiana Petrova muere al caer desde la ventana de su piso en Moscú la misma semana en que es asesinado un multimillonario mafioso. La pista de ambos sucesos conduce a Kaliningrado, "ciudad secreta" de la guerra fría. Al ahondar en el pasado de Tatiana, Arkady encuentra un mundo surrealista de dunas viajeras, niños abandonados y una libreta escrita en el código indescifrable de un intérprete muerto.

More wonderful Arkady Renko. The last for now. A small snapshot of the fight against corruption in modern Russia. Just great characters; great settings and scenes; fascinating history; very good endings. ( )

A professional interpreter is murdered on a beach in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea coast. A Russian Mafia gang leader is murdered in Moscow and a muckraking female journalist commits suicide by jumping out a window from her sixth story apartment. Her body subsequently disappears from the morgue, but her sister has identified the remains from a photograph of the body provided by Russian police. Arkady Renko decides to investigate the disappearance of her corpse and we are off and running in another Renko investigation that tries to figure out the significance of a notebook that was in the reporter's possession at the time of her death. But the notebook consists of several pages of undecipherable figures and symbols. How are these events related? What is the meaning of the notebook and why do so many sinister types care so much about it? Martin Cruz Smith has written another high quality detective story that pulls back even further, if possible, the veil of corruption endemic to Russia in the age of Putin. This is not quite his best effort but is a great read with enough plot twists to keep the reader engaged. Well worth it for both the general reader and the devotees of the Renko series. ( )