TATIANA by Martin Cruz Smith - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
See all titles by Martin Cruz Smith.
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 dictatorship. 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-floor window
in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigorenko, is
shot and buried with the trappings due a lord. No one makes the
connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he discovers of
Tatiana’s voice, even as she describes horrific crimes hidden by
official versions.
The trail leads to Kaliningrad, 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 teenage chess hustler.
More than a mystery, Tatiana is a story rich in character, black humor, and romance, with an insight that is the hallmark of Martin Cruz Smith.