Tangled Web UK Review April 2008
Stalin's Ghost by
Martin Cruz Smith
pbk out March 08
(Pan)
at £7.99
Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Prosecutor’s Office, is having a tough time. Zhenya, the runaway boy Renko has given a home to is missing; and Renko’s lover Eva is seeing another man, a fellow officer. To cap it all his boss has chosen Renko to investigate mysterious sightings of Joseph Stalin on the underground. For the party faithful, apparitions of the great dictator are a cause for celebration. Whilst in other parts of the city the mass graves of Stalin’s victims are being uncovered. And it’s winter so Moscow is smothered in snow and plunged into bitterly cold temperatures. By turns surreal and violent, funny and heartbreaking, Cruz Smith paints a damning picture of a vodka drenched, body strewn New Russia. When Renko interferes in a colleague’s murder case (the very man Eva is involved with) and finds a trail leading back to events in Chechnya, he becomes a target himself. Renko is a wonderful creation: brave, gloomy and humane and a man who has managed to rise above his own bloody and brutal upbringing. Marvellous.
(
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder)
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