Sun 29 May 2011
A Review by Tina Karelson: MARTIN CRUZ SMITH – Three Stations.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
MARTIN CRUZ SMITH – Three Stations. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, August 2010. Pocket, trade paperback, September 2011.
As aged and battered as Moscovian police detective Arkady Renko must be by now, he’s evidently still irresistible to women, such as the journalist in Three Stations. Be that as it may, he’s worthy of being irresistible to readers. In this, the seventh in the series that began with Gorky Park 30 years ago, he’s still solving crime and helping friends with his intelligence, integrity and dark humor.
One young woman’s murder intertwines with the story of a young prostitute, Maya. With her baby, she escapes her controllers; they send assassins to make an example of her. Hoping to disappear into the crowds of Moscow, Maya instead loses her baby to kidnappers running illegal adoptions.
Determined to find the child, she crosses paths with Arkady’s chess-playing protégé, Zhenya, and the threads begin to weave together. The ending could be more elegantly finished, but at least it’s a happy one, whatever that means in such a bleak context.
Three Stations is a devastating look at what the promise of a new Russia has devolved into.
May 30th, 2011 at 6:50 am
GORKY PARK was the book that began the Arkady Renko series 30 years ago.
May 30th, 2011 at 6:53 pm
I knew it was GORKY PARK. Evidently there was a short-circuit between my brain and my fingers. This is especially embarrassing since this is one of the VERY few series I have read in order, in its entirety, and that I buy and read in hardcover as soon as possible after publication.
May 30th, 2011 at 7:50 pm
Color my face red too. I didn’t catch that either, even after Jeff pointed it out. I’ll go ahead and make the correction.
And since any series that’s 30 years old ought to be spelled out in detail, here are all seven, with the years they were published:
The Arkady Renko novels:
1. Gorky Park (1981)
2. Polar Star (1989)
3. Red Square (1992)
4. Havana Bay (1999)
5. Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
6. Stalin’s Ghost (2007)
7. Three Stations (2010)
May 31st, 2011 at 6:57 am
I knew you both knew it.
I know Bill Crider is a big fan of Smith’s paperback original series about Francis Xavier Killy, “The Inquisitor” for the Vatican’s Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome, written as by Simon Quinn.
June 11th, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Yep, a very entertaining series. Recommended.
September 8th, 2011 at 7:50 am
As much as I believe the Arkady Renko series should canonized by Those Who Deign Such Thing as classics (because Smith is _that_ good of a writer), I also believe that his stand-alone novels — STALLION GATE, ROSE and DECEMBER 6 — transcend the Renko series of novels. If pressed, I would pick ROSE as my favorite of the three, but all of them are sublime when it comes to prose, plot and, of course, character. Smith is a national treasure, ranking up there with John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.