Tatiana An Arkady Renko novel

IT'S A SPOOKY FEELING, if you're a translator who loves bicycling and word games and likes traveling to Russia, to open a book and encounter, in the very first chapter, a translating, cycling crossword fanatic who is plucked from a Kaliningrad beach by a homburg-hatted butcher, hurled into a carcass-strewn meat van and never heard from again. (Note to self: Avoid Kaliningrad.) At the time he was nabbed, the translator was carrying a notebook he'd used at a session of multilingual, high-stakes business negotiations. His abductor, flipping through the pages, was infuriated to find them filled with illegible doodles - stars, bugs, cats and spirals - the translator's own private code. "Let the birds read it," the butcher declared, flinging the notebook into the wind. Local children later found it in the sea grass. Could this collection of rebuses hold the key to the deaths of a muckraking journalist, Tatiana Petrovna, and a slimy oligarch, Grisha Grigorenko, in Moscow, 700 miles away? What else might it conceal? The reporter bought the notebook from the kids in Kaliningrad just before she died. Might it, therefore, be dangerous to attempt to decode it? In "Tatiana," his eighth crime novel dominated by the lawless landmass once known as the Soviet Union, Martin Cruz Smith sets his Slavic sleuth, Arkady Renko, on the case. Like his fellow thriller writer, the late Tom Clancy, Smith hasn't let the end of the Cold War deter him from raking the Formerly Evil Empire for bloodcurdling tales of suspense and intrigue. Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, both authors kept a cool war nicely chilled, piling ice on the corpus delicti to keep the frisson intact. While both men have written of submarines, suicides, murders and mayhem, soldiers and statesmen, and the machinations of the K.G.B., F.S.B. and C.I.A., Smith has always had a lighter, more emotional touch. The main event of a Tom Clancy novel is always its precise, technically detailed plotting, but it's the human factor that takes center stage for Martin Cruz Smith. His protagonist, Arkady Renko, Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases in the Moscow prosecutor's office, is a hangdog, underdog hero - romantic in a diffident, chain-smoking way, like Rick Blaine in "Casablanca." Unlucky in love, mistrusted by the higher-ups, Renko has a soft spot for outcasts (he's the guardian of a surly teenage chess hustler named Zhenya) and a conscience that goads him to put himself at risk to serve truth, justice and the Arkady Renko way of life. Early in "Tatiana," Renko gate-crashes Grisha Grigorenko's funeral to spy on various mourners from the Moscow underworld. In life, Grisha had been the crime boss of Kaliningrad; his death made room for a successor. When the capo's son spots Renko, he indignantly accosts him. "You're going to hound him to his grave?" he snaps. "This is harassment." More muscular harassment comes a little later, when Renko bumps into another group of mourners who have gathered to protest the untimely end of Tatiana Petrovna. As skinheads hurl bricks at demonstrators and a police bus pulls up, releasing baton-wielding cops, the riot police mistake Renko for a demonstrator and puncture his lung by "dancing on his ribs." When he flashes his investigator's ID, a cop drops his fist: "He's with us?" Well, yes and no. Renko's allegiances are personal, not professional. He knows he should have quit the detective business long ago, "but there was always a reason to stay and a semblance of control, as if a man falling with an anvil in his hands could be said to be in control." Smith's metaphor could double for the strategy of the Putin administration, which has reasserted a tight grip on power with a certain disregard for the consequences. The Yeltsin '90s are over, Renko reflects: "Those heady days were gone, deflated, and all they had reaped was bruises." Those who track international headlines will note echoes of Putin-era events scattered throughout "Tatiana." Smith's title character was inspired by the intrepid Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006 - payback for her aggressive reporting on Chechnya and political corruption. On the ground in real-life Russia, Politkovskaya's death was not vigorously investigated; Moscow prosecutors eventually assigned blame to a former policeman who was sentenced in December 2012. But in Smith's fictional Moscow, Tatiana Petrovna's demise instantly raises Senior Investigator Renko's hackles. Did she really commit suicide, as the authorities claim? Or was she killed? When Renko learns that her body has gone missing from the Moscow morgue, his suspicions are aroused. "The case is closed," Renko's boozing sidekick grumbles; and his boss warns, "Your colleagues are fed up with the melodrama of your life." Even Tatiana's editor tells Renko to back off: "What are you doing? The war is over." But the war is never over for Smith's dogged hero, whose paranoia, time and again, turns out to be justified. Besides, the editor has shown Renko the cryptic notebook from Kaliningrad. Tatiana had known the interpreter personally, she'd told her boss; these scrawls held information about criminal networks in Moscow and Kaliningrad. She was determined to break the code and expose the malefactors in a "glorious, going-down-in flames sort of article." Her editor refuses to give the notebook to Renko: It's reserved for one of his reporters. But that reporter happens to be one of Renko's sometime girlfriends. In near possession of such a tantalizing piece of evidence, how could any detective resist the hunt? Gaining entry to Tatiana's abandoned apartment, Renko finds a stash of tapes that hold her accounts of multiple crises - the Beslan school massacre of 2004, the Moscow metro bombing of 2010 and, further back, the terrorist takeover of a Moscow theater in 2002. Renko listens to tape after tape, alert for hints of the woman behind the warrior. "I am supposed to be so grave but I am sick of gravity," Tatiana says on one tape. "I ache for a man I haven't met." On another tape, Renko hears murkier sounds: eerie metallic scrapes and taps that come from the belly of the Kursk nuclear submarine, in which 118 sailors drowned in 2000. For reasons Renko can't fathom, Tatiana had labeled that tape "Grisha." Was this the capo who was laid to rest at Vagankovo Cemetery? Listening to Tatiana's voice, Renko falls under the spell of a woman he's never seen: "He thought he knew her and that they had met before. Was that obsessive?" Ask him when he gets to Kaliningrad. 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. Time and again, the paranoia of Martin Cruz Smith's dogged hero turns out to be justified. LIESL SCHILLINGER is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

*Starred Review* The more Russia changes, the more it supports Arkady Renko's unremittingly bleak worldview: I'm a cynic. I believe in car wrecks, airline disasters, missing children, self-immolation, suffocation with pillows. And, yet, he soldiers on, a cop perpetually on the outs with his superiors, trying to solve cases that no one wants solved. I have no authority anywhere, Arkady explains, but I like to understand things. But things, in the New Russia, are getting harder and harder to understand. Arkady knows corruption, of course, but the new corruption, from officialdom through the Mob now as powerful as the party ever was leaves even a lifetime cynic shaking his head in wonder and dismay. The apparent suicide of investigative reporter Tatiana Petrovna Was she really murdered? Is she even dead? sends Arkady on another of his ill-advised searches for answers, this time taking him to Kaliningrad, an isolated, Mob-dominated city with the highest crime rate in Russia. What Arkady finds there is a grayed-out surreal landscape, postapocalyptic but without an apocalypse, in which the answers he seeks are as elusive as they are lethal. That Smith has kept this series going for more than 30 years, finding through decades of change more and more reasons for Arkady to justify his cynicism, says much about the modern world and much about Arkady's bedrock humanity in the face of snowballing absurdity. If a man believes in self-immolation, Tatiana asks Arkady, what doesn't he believe in? I don't believe in saints, Arkady replies. They get people killed. --Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist

One of the most affecting memes emerging from Russia today is that of a crusading woman journalist whose quest illuminates the darkest reaches of post-Soviet iniquity. Arkady Renko, also a crusader for truth and justice, finds the official explanation of journalist Tatiana Petrovna's death (inspired by the real-life murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya) fishy and follows his nose to the murky enclave of Kaliningrad. There he grapples with a horrific plot among Chinese shipbuilders, the Russian mafia, and defense agency profiteers to make a rotten deal that will lead to a bonanza for the bad guys. Renko may be reaching the last of his fabled nine lives in this eighth chapter (after Three Stations) of the Russian police inspector's epic life. VERDICT Burnished to a fine sheen, this tale has it all: a high-velocity plot complete with diabolically clever codes, endearing chess-playing teenagers, patricide, and death-defying Renko, still indomitable despite a scarred and weary hide. Pair Renko with Stuart Kaminsky's Inspector Rostnikov, and throw in Brett Ghelfi's gun-for-hire Alexei Volkovoy to achieve an unbeatable season of well-written and crackling reading enjoyment. [See Prepub Alert, 5/20/13.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.