A passenger train hurtling through the night. An unwed teenage mother
headed to Moscow to seek a new life. A cruel-hearted soldier looking
furtively, forcibly, for sex. An infant disappearing without a trace. So
begins Martin Cruz Smith's masterful Three Stations, a suspenseful,
intricately constructed novel featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. For
the last three decades, beginning with the trailblazing Gorky Park,
Renko (and Smith) have captivated readers with detective tales set in
Russia. Renko is the ironic, brilliantly observant cop who finds
solutions to heinous crimes when other lawmen refuse to even acknowledge
that crimes have occurred. He uses his biting humor and intuitive leaps
to fight not only wrongdoers but the corrupt state apparatus as well. In
Three Stations, Renko's skills are put to their most severe test. Though
he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor's office for once
again turning up unpleasant truths, he strives to solve a last case: the
death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction
trailer on the perimeter of Moscow's main rail hub. It looks like a
simple drug overdose to everyone--except to Renko, whose examination of
the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an
invitation to Russia's premier charity ball, the billionaires' Nijinksy
Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of
Moscow's rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the
face of Putin's crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power.
Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that
threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is
desperate to protect. In Three Stations, Smith produces a complex and
haunting vision of an emergent Russia's secret underclass of street
urchins, greedy thugs and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and
fear.
