Martin Cruz Smith, "Stalin's Ghost"
Martin's Cruz Smith's latest Arkady Renko novel is "Stalin's Ghost", published this month. The series which began with "Gorky Park" is set in Russia, from the last years of the Cold War to the contemporary, ideologically empty New Russia. Renko is a cynical, world-weary detective after my own heart, and with the death of writer Michael Dibdin last April (and the last of his Aurelio Zen novels to be published in July), it feels a bit like the end of an era. Martin Cruz Smith, Ken Bruen, and Laurie R. King excepted, there are few mainstream crime novelists writing in English whose books I look forward to any more. It was with immense pleasure that I picked up this book in the store today.
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Prologue
Winter was what Muscovites lived for. Winter knee-deep in snow that softened the city, flowed from golden dome to golden dome, resculpted statues and transformed park paths into skating trails. Snow that sometimes fell as a lacy haze, sometimes thick as down. Snow that made sedans of the rich and powerful crawl behind snowplows. Snow that folded and unfolded, teasing the eye with glimpses of an illuminated globe above the Central Telegraph Office, Apollo's chariot leaving the Bolshoi, a sturgeon sketched in neon at a food emporium. Women shopped amid the gusts, gliding in long fur coats. Children dragged sleds and snowboards, while Lenin lay in his mausoleum, deaf to correction, wrapped in snow.
And, in Arkady's experience, when the snow melted, bodies would be discovered. In Moscow that was Spring.
[...]
Would the snow ever end? Arkady wondered. A Pathfinder rolled up to a gas pump. The mafia was getting conservative; now that they had seized and established their separate territories they were defenders of the status quo. Their children would be bankers and their children would be poets, something like that. Count on it, in fifty years, a golden age of poetry.