Stalin s Ghost
£1.74
Good book, just not as good as what s gone before - Gorky Park - Great convoluted murder mystery set in the Soviet Union. It s a bit overlong. The film version is a simplified travesty.Polar Star - My favourite of the books. It s a bit more like a traditional murder mystery as it has everyone trapped together on a fish processing ship.Red Square - Perhaps the most inventive of the books. I always thought it was a great idea what the red square of the title actual is, and what it does.Havana Bay - Arkady goes to Cuba. This was the first of the books that I read. If I read it in chronological order I might like it a lot more. As it was, I felt utterly confused by the book as it had two alien cultures meeting each other, and a lot of backstory. I enjoyed it enough to read the others so I think it must be a good book.Wolves Eat Dogs - Another excellent setting. This time Arkady Renko goes into modern day, semi-deserted radioactive Chernobyl. I thought this was probably the most purely enjoyable book of the series as the first two or three feel quite weighty even if they re not.Stalin s Ghost - It s probably the lesser of the six books but considering the quality of the previous novels, that s not really a critiscism. It s fairly short and not half as labyrinthine as the earlier books. I m also slightly puzzled by the logic of it:*OBSCURELY WORDED SPOILER*I don t quite understand why the men had to be killed, instead of paid off or intimidated, for their silence, and why they would go to such lengths if he was only considered to be a paper candidate to begin with?
Maintaining a fine standard - Martin Cruz Smith s thrillers featuring Arkady Renko are at the top of the tree, and Stalin s Ghost maintains the high standard. However, I d recommend reading its predecessor, the superb Wolves Eat Dogs, before you read SG.
Well-written, but the plot could have been stronger..... - I like Martin Cruz Smith s writing and I have enjoyed prior novels with Senior Investigator Arkady Renko as the lead character.In common with the prequels, the book is instructive on life in Russia and contains some rich observations. I liked lines like as he was leaving Moscow and driving into Russia......The plot is not all that deep but takes Renko to Tver and very nearly sees him killed. I found the book to be populated with strange scenarios, relationships and interactions as Renko tries to solve a couple of mysteries. The relevance of a couple of Americans who played bit parts still escapes me and the Stalin s Ghost angle in the metro seems to have done more for others than it did for me. Here too, Renko struggles with his own demons and his relationships with his adopted son and partner. To get the most out of this book, I suspect a reader would need to have built a strong relationship with Renko from prior novels.For whatever reason, I judged this book first as crime novel and I didn t feel it was as strong as other Cruz Smith books I have read. 7/10
Pleasantly surprising - Having never read a Martin Cruz Smith book, but having been impressed by the film of Gorky Park I actually bought this book in desperation. I was travelling back from Istanbul to the UK via Munich and had run out of books to read before reaching Istanbul airport. A quick trawl of the bookshop persuaded me to purchase Stalin s Ghost. What impressed me was the quality of the writing as much as anything. Phrases like Time nibbled away at the afternoon and Night crouched outside the casino show a real talent for writing. Add to this a densely plotted thriller in modern Russian and it was an excellent page-turner.I finished it in one go - Istanbul to Munich, 4 hours in Munich, Munich to Manchester and then a 25-minute queue for passport control. I read the last page walking through the baggage reclaim section. The fact that I was really tired (early start, long day, two time zone changes) underlines the quality of the book - I could not stop reading it. The author has a clear eye for the detail of post-communist Russia and the spectre of Stalin pervades the novel.I ll probably buy the other Renko books now, perhaps even Gorky Park - having seen the film it will be interesting to see how the book holds up.
In Arkady s experience, when the snow melted, bodies would be discovered. In Moscow, that was spring. - In his sixth Arkady Renko novel in twenty-six years, Martin Cruz Smith continues the character development of the aging Renko, a complex police investigator with an inherent honesty that serves as a barrier to advancement in contemporary Moscow. With the downfall of communism, Russia is now filled with corrupt politicians, organized crime lords, police acting as killers for hire, and a pervading uncertainty about the future. With every man for himself, it is no wonder that Renko, at the mercy of higher authorities in the force and unable to investigate the corruption he sees, has developed a healthy cynicism and pragmatism about life.As the Moscow winter wanes, a mass grave from the mid-1940s is found at a construction site, obviously a place for the disposal of those executed under Stalin s rule, with the help of Renko s father, one of Stalin s trusted deputies. No modern investigation results, and no one is surprised. The inaction is all part of life in this city where the past and the present come together in a whirlpool which sucks the life out of its citizens. When the ghost of Stalin is seen wandering the subway, Renko is assigned to this low level case. As many ordinary citizens long for the good old days, Stalinism is on the rise, and Police Inspector Nicolai Isakov, a killer for hire, is running for public office on a Stalinist platform. A wartime hero for his actions as a Black Beret during the Chechen war, Isakov has never received medals or promotion for his behavior, and Renko is curious about why. When the other Black Berets who served with Isakov begin to die violent deaths, Renko begins a surreptitious investigation and finds himself fighting for his life. His personal relationships are not improved when his lover, Eva, begins sleeping with Isakov, and Zhenya, the twelve-year-old street orphan to whom Renko has offered a home, disappears, presumably to hustle at chess.Cruz Smith s immensely satisfying plotting grows naturally from life in Moscow and its values and mores (for good and for evil), and when dramatic and gory scenes of violence arise, they do so within the context of a setting fully developed sociologically and historically. The characters are individualized and empathetic at all levels, and Arkady, who has continued to grow and change over the course of twenty-six years, still hopes that goodness will triumph, despite the country s current problems. Even secondary characters, like Zhenya become fully rounded, their motivations clear. The occasional black humor and Arkady s sardonic observations keep the reader engaged, even as the author raises questions about the future of Arkady and others like him who hope for a long-term justice. Mary Whipple