Independence Square by Martin Cruz Smith

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 9, 2023

Arkady Renko is one of my favorite protagonists in the world of crime fiction. Renko has long struggled (with surprising success) to maintain his integrity in a corrupt land. In Independence Square, his indirect adversary is the most powerful man in Russia, if only because all corruption in Russia eventually pays its dues to Putin.

The story takes place shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A Moscow racketeer who goes by the nickname Bronson wants to hire Renko to find Karina Abakov, his missing daughter. As a Moscow police detective, Renko knows his perilous career will be over if he is caught taking money from Bronson, but he agrees to help for free.

Karina was affiliated with a social movement called Forum for Democracy. When Renko asks if the movement is anti-government, the response he receives is “Isn’t everybody?” Whenever the group has a demonstration, motorcycle thugs known as the Werewolves break it up. The Werewolves are Putin’s version of the Hell’s Angels. How they know the Forum’s movements in advance is a mystery.

Renko has an adopted son named Zhenya who happens to know Karina. Zhenya knows Karina’s friend Elena better. Zhenya’s friend Alex is sweet on Karina, so Renko visits with Alex and Elena to see if either of them has a line on Karina’s current location. Alex apparently learns something about Karina and sends Renko pictures of three Russian authors as a coded clue. Before Renko can meet with him again, Alex is assassinated. Renko is assigned to investigate the death, giving him cover to poke into Karina's disappearance.

The story involves multiple loosely related assassinations. Renko’s search for Karina takes him to Kyev and Sevastopol, where some of those assassinations occur. The plot twists a couple of times and generates at least one genuine surprise. Fortunately, Martin Cruz Smith doesn’t follow the path of outrageous twists that are common to lesser thriller writers. The story never sacrifices plausibility to create suspense, but Smith does generate tension as the plot moves toward its conclusion. Independence Square isn’t as compelling as Smith’s best novels, but I am always captivated by the stories he tells.

Although the story precedes the invasion of Ukraine, it is timely. Renko views Putin’s Russia as “Stalin’s Great Terror updated for modern times, with disinformation, legal machinations, indiscriminate violence.” While Putin is a monster lurking just beyond the novel’s perimeter, much of the story focuses not on the forthcoming war but on Crimean Tartars, an ethic group that has been oppressed for centuries. Through a Tartar living in exile in Kyev, Smith offers a quick lesson in the group’s history before and after the most recent Russian occupation of Crimea.

Renko’s life changes a bit with every novel in the series. In Independence Square, Renko becomes involved with Elena just as Tatiana, the journalist who used to be his lover, crosses his path again. Tatiana is the woman he can’t forget. Her loss is one of the many events that has left Renko with a tortured soul. His discovery that he is in the early stages of Parkinson’s only adds to his sense of resignation. Whether resignation will be offset by hope and whether newfound hope will be shattered are always questions in Renko novels. Where Renko’s life will go next is a question I hope Smith will answer soon.

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The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith

Published by Simon & Schuster on November 5, 2019

The Siberian Dilemma feels like an interlude in Arkady Renko’s fateful life. He is still involved with Tatiana, a fiercely independent journalist in a dangerous occupation. Tatiana has gone to Siberia to cover the political campaign of an oligarch named Mikhail Kuznetsov. When she does not return to Moscow as expected, Renko worries that something bad might have happened to her. From Renko’s perspective, “something bad” might include a romantic attachment to Kuznetsov.

Renko is therefore pleased, more or less, when Zurin, his boss, sends him to Irkutsk to pick up a Chechen named Aba Makhmud and transport him to a transit prison before prosecuting him and assuring he receives a long sentence. Makhmud has already confessed to attempting to kill Zurin. Renko knows that confessions in Russia are worthless and promptly gets to the bottom of the crime. In the meanwhile, his trip to Irkutsk gives him an opportunity to look for Tatiana.

After dealing with Makhmud, Renko meets Tatiana, Kuznetsov, and Kuznetsov’s friend and business associate, Boris Benz, another oligarch in the oil business. Benz plans to inspect some oil rigs that have been sabotaged. He invites Renko to accompany him so they can hunt bear. As the reader might expect, bear are not the only hunter’s prey on the trip.

The story that Martin Cruz Smith tells in The Siberian Dilemma is a bit more sparse than is typical of his Renko novels. Smith keeps the story in motion and creates tension with vivid scenes in the frigid environs of Siberia, but after setting up a dramatic moment near the novel’s end, Smith resolves it with a fortuitous coincidence that departs from his customary realism. This might be the most contrived ending in the series. For that reason, it is less powerful than most of the other Renko novels.

My complaint about the ending doesn’t stop me from recommending the novel. As he has been developed over the course of nine novels, Arkady Renko is one of the most complex and sympathetic characters in crime fiction. Mild disappointment with the plot didn’t prevent me from enjoying Arkady’s most recent battle with Russian corruption or from cheering his reunion with Tatiana. I’m not sure that any crime fiction character is a more endearing representation of the struggle to overcome adversity than Arkady Renko. Smith always writes from the heart, making even a lesser Renko book a better choice than most crime fiction.

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The Girl from Venice by Martin Cruz Smith

Published by Simon & Schuster on October 18, 2016

The Girl from Venice is a standalone novel. I love Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series and I wish he had dished out another Renko novel (if only because I prefer his crime stories to his war stories), but I nevertheless enjoyed this story of an Italian fisherman who must deal with his love for his dead wife, his unwanted commitment to his dead brother’s wife, his animosity toward his living brother, and his unexpected attachment to a younger woman.

Innocenzo Vianello (known to friends as Cenzo) has taken up the family tradition of earning a living from the sea. World War II is coming to an end and Cenzo, who finds it confusing for a nation to change sides in the middle of a war, has no use for the Germans, the Americans, the partisans, or the Italian government. The war claimed the life of his wife and one of his two brothers. Cenzo’s mother wants him to marry his dead brother’s beautiful widow (it’s customary in his village), but Cenzo feels no desire for her. Before she died, his wife left him for his living brother (an actor who manages propaganda for Mussolini) and, even if Cenzo had a taste for a new relationship, his dead brother’s widow bores him.

While fishing one night, Cenzo encounters a young woman named Giulia who is being hunted by Nazis. For reasons he does not quite understand, Cenzo hides Giulia in his fishing shack. Giulia is from a prosperous Jewish family in Venice. Cenzo is from Pellestrina, “which was like saying they were not only from opposite sides of the lagoon but from different worlds.” Giulia’s father was working to end the war, but he was the victim of treachery. The man responsible for her father’s death cannot rest safely unless Giulia dies, as well.

The Girl from Venice is a love story and a war story, but as you would expect from Smith, it is more than that. Circumstances converge to roil Cenzo’s life at the end of the war, forcing him to make difficult choices when he wants nothing more than to be left alone. Although a veteran of the Italian army, Cenzo is far from heroic. He makes sarcastic remarks about Mussolini (particularly when he’s drunk) but he isn’t about to take an active role in resisting the fascists. His goal is to survive the war in peace, yet he risks his life early in the novel by acting with uncharacteristic violence.

Smith gives authenticity to the characters and to the story with an impressive display of fishing lore. I like the contrasts Smith draws -- between brothers, between the different worlds of city life and village life, between the knowledge acquired in school and the knowledge acquired by a lifetime of fishing, between a world that seems small to a traveler and a lagoon that seems big to someone who has always lived next to it. I also like Cenzo’s view of Italy as a crab pot, its occupants “climbing over each other and shedding our own shells, Fascists one moment, Reds the next.”

The story is less suspenseful than a Renko novel. It didn’t trigger the same emotional response that I expect from a Renko story. Its ending is broadly predictable, although the details are unexpected. Still, The Girl from Venice tells an intriguing story about a likable man who needs to put the past in the past and find a way to move forward.

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Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith

Published by Simon & Schuster on November 12, 2013

Some writers of genre fiction transform the genre, taking it to a new level of excellence. Martin Cruz Smith has done that to crime fiction with his Arkady Renko novels.

An interpreter is killed after being kidnapped by a thug who has been paid to steal the interpreter's notes of a secret meeting. Unfortunately for the thug (and for the interpreter), the notes are encoded, so the thief discards them. The notebook makes its way to a journalist named Tatiana Petrovna, who is soon the apparent victim of a murder. The Kremlin, happy to see the end of a prominent critic of governmental corruption, proclaims the death a suicide and closes the investigation. Renko, as always, isn't buying the official line.

To get to the bottom of Tatiana's murder, Renko must learn why the interpreter was killed. The plot takes Renko to Kaliningrad, a city noted for its high crime rate and the center of the world's amber trade. Renko gets help (or hindrance) from Zhenya (a young chess genius who became Renko's ward in an earlier novel) and the poet Maxim Dal, as well as Renko's boss and co-workers. Of the various supporting characters, Zhenya (whose struggle to decide upon his future provides a strong subplot) gets the largest share of Smith's artistic attention. Renko's neighbor and part-time lover, Anya Rudenko, also plays a role. Her association with the son of a recently deceased mobster gives the beleaguered Renko yet another problem to worry about.

Smith is an old school thriller writer. His plots are surprising but believable. He writes absorbing stories without heavy reliance on car chases and martial arts contests to hold the reader's interest. His never forgets the importance of character development. In that regard, Renko is one of the strongest characters in crime fiction. In novel after novel, as his world deteriorates, Renko endures. He is, paradoxically, a cynical idealist. Given the corruption that surrounds him, Renko doesn't believe his actions will improve Russian life but he carries on anyway, perhaps because solving crime is all he knows how to do. With a bullet lodged in his head that could kill him at any moment, he is understandably fatalistic but never morose. His wry humor is often self-effacing, making him an immensely likeable character, but he displays the emotional complexity of the best literary creations.

Tatiana is shorter and tighter than some earlier Renko novels. The story is not as poignant or as personal as the best novels in the series, but Smith nonetheless supplies the skillful plotting and soul-revealing characterization that make the Renko novels so memorable. Tatiana is a nifty display of storytelling and a worthy addition to a wonderful series.

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