TATIANA

Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At the beginning of TATIANA, a bicycle racing interpreter who is conversant in several languages is murdered, but that’s not the case Arkady Renko is interested in. Journalist Tatiana Petrovna, a determined young woman bent on rooting out corruption in high places, falls from a sixth floor apartment, to her death and the police are convinced it was a suicide. Arkady doesn’t believe it.

Arkady Renko is pretty close to being clinically depressed. His adopted son Zhenya wants to join the army. Zhenya is a chess genius and Arkady is convinced he can do better; Arkady won’t sign the papers to allow Zhenya to enlist. Meanwhile Arkady’s on and off girlfriend, Anya, seems to determined to follow Tatiana’s dangerous mission as a journalist, flirting with a mafia boss.

The whole case revolves around a notebook left behind by the interpreter; it’s not in code; it seems to be a set of doodles the interpreter used to stimulate his memory about a job he’d been working on.

Meanwhile mafia leader Grisha Grigorenko is also murdered, and his son seems to think he should be the heir apparent. The interpreter murder, Tatiana’s so-called suicide and the mafia killing seem related. In Renko’s Russia, the mafia plays a much greater role than the media has led us to believe.

Arkady gets hold of the notebook, but can’t make much sense of it, but Zhenya takes it on as a challenge, especially after a young girl beats him at chess, and he wants to impress her.

Renko really doesn’t have any authority to investigate anything, but his alcoholic friend Victor, who like Sherlock Holmes, only gets high when he’s not on a case, reluctantly helps. They center on Kaliningrad where Tatiana’s sister lives. Kaliningrad is a dump, except for its depleted amber mines, and Arkady believes they have something to do with what‘s going on.

A good theme for this book would be “nothing is as it seems”; once we move toward the end, Martin Cruz Smith throws us a few curve balls, or twists in the literary vernacular. I’ve read all of the Arkady Renko mysteries, and this one moves along at a pretty rapid pace; there’s even room for optimism at the end, somewhat unusual for a Renko novel.



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