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292 pages, Hardcover
First published November 12, 2013
There were fourteen morgues in Moscow, some as clean as model kitchens, others abattoirs with carts of bloody saws and chisels. Arkady fell into a kind of fugue state, seeing with a cold professional eye, being there and not there.This was more of an "it-was-ok" spliced with but-I-liked-it-sort-of. This must be the tenth Martin Cruz Smith I've read since Gorky Park way back in the eighties, you'd think things would have improved more noticeably in thirty years, but well, there you go. Somehow not much.
Every time I read a Martin Cruz Smith novel, I marvel again over just how good he is. This one, the latest Arkady Renko novel, is the shortest one yet (under 200 pages). It's fast-moving, not just because it's short but because it's tightly plotted. As with other Arkady Renko stories, it takes place against a backdrop of corrupt police, criminal oligarchs, and the poorest of the poor (who are not Dickens-style poor but barbarian wretches who'd rob their own mothers on their deathbeds). The familiar plot lines are here: Arkady is out of favor with his bosses, almost no one is willing to help him investigate a crime, Arkady plods on regardless of professional and personal danger. So is it cookie-cutter Renko? Maybe. But it's so damn good you don't care. Imagine an alternate universe where a one-hour police procedural on TV was actually good. Now imagine a universe where that one-hour police procedural on TV was ten times better than that. That approaches how good Three Stations is.