Good News!
TATIANA is a Kirkus best book of the year…
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/issue/best-of-2013/section/fiction/?page=11
Congratulations!
One of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko—cynical, analytical and quietly subversive—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. InTatiana, Martin Cruz Smith’s most ambitious novel sinceGorkyPark, the melancholy hero finds himself on the trail of a mystery as complex and dangerous, as modernRussiaherself.
The fearless investigative reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window inMoscowthe same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigorenko, is shot and buried with the trappings due a lord. No one makes the connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes of Tatiana’s voice, even as she describes horrific crimes hidden by official versions.
The trail leads toKaliningrad, a Cold War ‘secret city’ and home of the Baltic Fleet, separated by hundreds of miles from the rest ofRussia. Arkady delves into Tatiana’s past and a surreal world of wandering dunes and amber mines. His only link is a notebook ‘written’ in the personal code of a translator whose body is found in the dunes. Arkady’s only hope of decoding the symbols lies in Zhenya, a teenage chess hustler.
In a fast-changing and lethal race to uncover what the translator knew, Renko makes a startling discovery that propels him deeper into Tatiana’s past—and, paradoxically, into Russia’s future, where bulletproof cars, poets, a butcher for hire, and a Chechen ‘weekend terrorist’ combine to lend Kaliningrad the ‘distinction’ of the highest crime rate in all of Russia.
More than a mystery,Tatianais a story rich in character, black humor and romance, with an insight that is the hallmark of Martin Cruz Smith.
Martin Cruz-Smith’snovels includeStalin’s Ghost,GorkyPark, Rose, December 6, Polar Star,andStallion Gate.A two-time winner of the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers and a recipient ofBritain’s Golden Dagger Award, he lives inCalifornia.
The bestselling author ofGorky Parkreturns with a blistering Arkady Renko novel whose heroine is based on real-life journalists of Russia.