Tatiana: Book Review

Tatiana is the latest in the Arkady Renko series written by Martin Cruz Smith.  (I mentioned briefly here the last book I'd read in the series.  To see all of my reviews on this series, click here.  Yeah, I like 'em.)  I liked this one as well as any in the series - no, it can't compare to the first but then none of them can - and you wouldn't do badly if you decided to dip in at this point.  As with all series, the asides and digressions will catch you up on who's who and what's happening but if you've been following the series, you may find these explanations tedious.  I did but then I always find these sections of a series book to be tedious.

Yep, there's a good mystery to be solved at the core and you'll probably figure it out before Renko does but go along for the ride anyway if you want to see the corruption of modern-day Russia and learn something along the way about Kaliningrad and chess and code-breaking and even high-class racing bicycles.  Smith's (Cruz Smith's? - I never know where to look for his books, under the C's or the S's) writing is smooth and swift and the story carries you along to a, well, not very spine-tingling climax but then you really didn't another shoot out did you?  No complaints:  the loose ends are tied up and all the characters accounted for and the pieces left in place for the next Arkady Renko adventure.

I'm looking forward to it.

Books I've Read

According to this blog, it's been well over a year since I've read a book but that presumes a truth to the philosophical question:  if a book review is unposted, does that mean a book hasn't been read?

Ha!  I've read books.  I just haven't posted about them.  Here's a list, in no particular order, of what I've read in the last 16 months or so:

Stephen Hunter's latest Sniper's Honor.  Bob Lee Swagger learns about a Russian, female sniper from World War II which, of course, has modern day repercussions.  Plenty of shooting and sniper lore and a harrowing, surrealistic battle scene between Nazi tanks and Commie tanks.  You haven't read anything like this before.

Lawrence Block's The Thief Who Counted The Spoons.  Delightful, but then the whole series is which meant I had to re-read the other 10 Bernie Rhodenbarr novels in the series to confirm it. and that lead me to re-read A Ticket to the Boneyard, which is anticipation of the upcoming movie of his book, A Walk Among the Tombstones which should be pretty good.  I mean, it's Liam Neeson against the bad guys.  What more could you want?

For some reason I turned back to Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.  I've blogged here about the rest of the series but you don't really know how good the first was until you go back there and see for yourself what Smith managed to do.  As good as the series is, the first is the best.  

I don't know why I read Robert Harris' The Ghost.  I've like his other stuff:  Fatherland, Enigma, and Pompeii, all of which I must've read before this blog since I don't see where I posted my thoughts on these before.  But I'd blogged about the movie, which I liked, despite many reasons not to, and I read the Kindle version which means I must've gotten a deal on it.  Whatever.  I enjoyed it.  I especially liked the behind-the-scenes look at ghost-writing and the publishing world.  Nice twist at the end, too.

Both volumes of Hemingway's Complete Letters.  (Link goes only to the first volume but you can get to the second volume from there.)  Sorry.  For aficionados only.  

So by my count that's 17 books or a little over a book a month.  Not much of a pace but it'll do.

Stallion Gate - Book Review (Again!)

In the recent "Great Blogger Blackout," the following post was lost and never re-stored. Posting it again for the sake of completeness so if it seems familiar, well, that's because it is. (Funky font brought to you by Facebook, which is a lesson learned, I guess: sending the RSS feed to my Facebook preserved the post. Users of Blogger might be well-served to do something similar with their posts in the event of future blackouts.)

Taking a break from his Arkady Renko novels, Martin Cruz Smith back in the '80s tried his hand at another genre - the World War 2 history genre, I guess you'd call it. Anyway, Stallion Gate it's a fictional treatment of the the development of the atom bomb at Los Alamos with some intrigue about spies thrown in for suspense with a twist of romantic drama to make things more interesting, as if the subject matter alone wasn't interesting enough.

Unfortunately, Smith takes the liberal view that communists really weren't that big a threat to the United States and anyone who thought so was paranoid and foolish. His protagonist, Joe Pena, doesn't take very seriously his assignment to prove that Oppenheimer is a Red and instead the personal becomes political. All that is good and fine, I suppose - LeCarre has made a pretty good living at just this sort of thing - but after 9/11 I don't have the patience for it anymore.

Still, Smith's powers of description are in full force here and he renders the New Mexican landscapes beautifully. He keeps things moving along and works in his research, which I assume is accurate, about the creation of the atomic bomb and the site where it was created in interesting ways. But the ending is ambiguous - did Pena get caught in the atomic blast? It seems so. But since I found him unsympathetic so I really didn't care and I guess that's the real problem with this novel: I just didn't care about the main character. A fatal flaw in any novel.

(Another of the cheap books I bought at the Friends of the Library book sale.)

Three Stations - Book Review

Martin Cruz Smith's Three Stations is his latest Arkady Renko novel and finishing it catches me up with the series. (Though I still think I need Red Square to be complete; I've no desire to go back that far in the series. Famous last words, though, so you never know.)

This one's as good as any of them. A remarkably fast read - well, that's because it's shorter by about 50 pages - involving another Russian landmark or location. (Three Stations is, well, three train stations located next to one another, where a mass of Russian humanity boils with their coming and going.) An intertwined storyline that, though not quite Dickensian, does involve street urchins and the tired trope of a serial killer. But plot isn't really important in Smith's Renko novels. It's the portrait of modern Russia that he creates of a tired, worn out country with a long, frequently dark past, trying desperately to keep up with the modern world and not quite making it. And the characters, of course. Always the characters.

Another great installment in this fine series.

Wolves Eat Dogs - Book Review

Next in line for me on my Martin Cruz Smith reading list was Wolves Eat Dogs, another Arkady Renko novel though this one is the installment before Stalin's Ghost. More great stuff. The mystery? A New Russian billionaire has committed suicide which in Old Russia, and, apparently, the New, means someone else killed him. The trail takes Renko to the no-man's land of Chernobyl and here Smith transports us, once again, to another strange world. As if Russia isn't strange enough.

Some of the characters in the Stalin make their first appearance here so that helps shed a little light on the subsequent novel. The characters names confuse me, of course, and I had a little trouble keeping them straight; I often do with mystery novels and that can be a problem - wasn't this guy the other guy who did one thing or the other? - and the Russian names only compounds the problem. But I buckled in for the ride and everything finally made sense. If Smith's research is accurate, the incidents leading up to the Chernobyl accident, its aftermath and the nether-world that's risen from the ashes, are weird and fascinating. A perfect setting for a mystery.

Another very good installment in a very good series.

Stalin's Ghost - Book Review

Holy crow! Nearly two months to get through one measly book? Well, not quite. I've spent a good deal of that time working my way through a couple of golfing books a and I don't count them for book review purposes. Maybe I should.

Regardless, it has taken me some time to get through Stalin's Ghost but that says more about me and my reading habits than it does about this fine mystery. It was good to get back to Smith's Russia and his investigator Arkady Renko after laying off for several years. Like a lot of readers, I thought Gorky Park was very well done and though I enjoyed both Polar Star and Havana Bay, I found other books and writers to interest me and so I never returned.

That's too bad. If Stalin's Ghost is an example of what I've been missing, I've been missing out on a lot. Renko is the same - an honest man, or a man trying to be honest, in a society that's entirely corrupt, haunted by the past and by the present. A bit of a mope, really, but not unpleasantly so. They mystery to be solved is the reason for the sightings of Stalin's ghost - no, it's not real, but there's a political motive and Renko, like any good investigator in these kinds of series, steps on a lot of toes trying to get to the bottom of it. I've missed out on the introduction of several characters from prior books but I didn't find it too big of a distraction. I struggled with the Russian names, of course, but that's probably more a function of my lousy handling of names in general than anything. Smith delivers a world that's strange to our Western eyes and immerses us to completely that it becomes familiar and that's quite an accomplishment.

I'm glad to re-discover a forgotten favorite writer and to see the old magic is still there. I'm looking forward to filling in the pieces I've missed - hey, I may even revisit some of the old stuff! Or even some of Smith's non-Arkady novels.