Back in the USSR.....
Watching the Sochi Olympics made me reach for one of my favorite authors.  Martin Cruz Smith published a new thriller in the Arkady Renko series.  Tatiana is his latest addition to this series featuring detective Arkady Renko.  We met Arkady in 2007 in Smith's first novel in the series Gorky Park.  Renko is a police detective in Moscow.  He has survived bullets, corruption, the evolution into the new Russia and the remnants of the Great Patriotic War. If we were to make a movie, we would need to revive Humphrey Bogart to play Arkady. Only he could match cynicism with a moral compass like Rick in Casablanca.  In Tatiana, Renko is suspicious about the supposed suicide of an  investigative reporter and the assassination of a Russian crime lord.  His investigations take him to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Coast where he encounters organized crime, a murderous butcher, a secret code, children searching for amber on the coast and a government cover-up of epic proportions. Smith captures contemporary geopolitics with a thriller that will have you guessing.