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A review by nigellicus
Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith
5.0
A young girl arrives at Moscow's Three Stations, her baby stolen. An only slightly older chess hustler is drawn to help in her single-minded search that draws in street gangs and pimps and murderous hoodlums, not to mention the chess-hustler's sort-of-adopted father, Arkady Renko. So far on the outs with his militia boss that he's not even working any cases, Renko pushes at the the apparent suicde of a prostitute and finds himself moving in some high circles indeed.
Two seperate plots neatly dovetailing is a new approach for a Renko book, and it works brilliantly, moving from the desperate lives of Moscow stree children to the obscenely wealthy elite who hold auctions to raise money for those same street children very little of which, as you migth imagine, reaches the actual streets. In particular, following the progress of the kidnapped baby from opportunistic kidnappers to would-be purchasers who have a change of heart when confronted with the reality of a crying child to abandonment on a subway generates agonies of horrified suspense, though the agonies and despair of the increasinly desperate child mother runs a close second.
Two seperate plots neatly dovetailing is a new approach for a Renko book, and it works brilliantly, moving from the desperate lives of Moscow stree children to the obscenely wealthy elite who hold auctions to raise money for those same street children very little of which, as you migth imagine, reaches the actual streets. In particular, following the progress of the kidnapped baby from opportunistic kidnappers to would-be purchasers who have a change of heart when confronted with the reality of a crying child to abandonment on a subway generates agonies of horrified suspense, though the agonies and despair of the increasinly desperate child mother runs a close second.