Release Date: June 12
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Snobby book reviewers like to say of well-written mysteries that they "transcend the genre." So I won't say that about Stalin's Ghost, or the rest of Smith's oeuvre, but he is an amazing writer, who writes rich, literary, sensurround prose without sacrificing the narrative tautness of the mystery genre. This is his 6th go-round with cynical Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, who first reared his grizzled head in Gorky Park in 1981, and this time the crime relates to the Russian conflict with Chechnya and implicates Renko's fellow officers. Hard-boiled mysteries may have been born in Los Angeles, but there is no more loveless, morally aimless, quintessentially noir city than present-day Moscow.