''Tatiana'' is a

crime novel Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, ...

Martin Cruz Smith Martin Cruz Smith (born November 3, 1942) is an American mystery novelist. He is best known for his nine-novel series (to date) on Russian investigator Arkady Renko, who was first introduced in 1981 with '' Gorky Park''. Early life and educ ...

set in

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

. It is the eighth novel to feature Detective-Investigator

Arkady Renko Arkady Renko ( Russian: Аркадий Ренко) is a fictional detective who is the central character of nine novels by the American writer Martin Cruz Smith.O'Brien, Timothy L. ''The New York Times'' (August 6, 2007)Martin Cruz Smith's Arkad ...

, published 32 years after the initial novel of the Renko series, '' Gorky Park''.Steinhauer, Olen, ''The New York Times'' (August 12, 2010)
Moscow Express
/ref>

Plot

One of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko —cynical, analytical, and quietly subversive— has survived the cultural journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find the nation as obsessed with secrecy and brutality as was the old Communist regime. In ''Tatiana'', Martin Cruz Smith's most ambitious novel since ''Gorky Park'', the melancholy hero finds himself on the trail of a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia herself. The fearless investigative reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-story window in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigorenko, is shot and buried with the trappings afforded minor royalty. No one makes the connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he discovers of Tatiana's voice, even as she describes horrific crimes concealed by official cover stories. The trail leads to

Kaliningrad Kaliningrad ( ; rus, Калининград, p=kəlʲɪnʲɪnˈɡrat, links=y), until 1946 known as Königsberg (; rus, Кёнигсберг, Kyonigsberg, ˈkʲɵnʲɪɡzbɛrk; rus, Короле́вец, Korolevets), is the largest city and ...

, a Cold War " secret city" and home of the Baltic Fleet, separated by hundreds of miles from the rest of Russia. Arkady delves into Tatiana's past and a surreal world of wandering dunes and amber mines. His only link is a notebook written in the personal code of a translator whose body is found in the dunes. Arkady's only hope of decoding the symbols lies in Zhenya, a gifted teenage chess hustler. The story was inspired by the murder of Russian journalist

Anna Politkovskaya Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (;, ; uk, Ганна Степанівна Політковська , 30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was a Russian journalist and human rights activist, who reported on political events in Russia, in partic ...

Schillinger, Liesl, ''The New York Times'' (November 17, 2013)
Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery
/ref> in 2006.

References

External links

Martin Cruz Smith official site
2013 American novels Arkady Renko Novels by Martin Cruz Smith Novels set in Moscow Simon & Schuster books Macmillan Publishers books {{2010s-crime-novel-stub