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A review by jayyenn
Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith
3.0
I received a copy of this book through a First Reads giveaway
I loved Gorky Park which is the only other Arkady Renko novel I've read. Tatiana is a much lighter read. It lacks the depth and complexity of Gorky Park leaving mostly just the trappings of a typical hard-boiled story. I thought there were too many tangents for such a short novel but that tends to happen in a series. That being said you don't need to read any of the previous books to get Tatiana.
The book provides a view of modern Russia through the eponymous subject of Renko's investigation and her reporting on corruption in finance and government. The character Tatiana is based on Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist murdered in 2006. Tatiana's murder is officially ruled a suicide but Renko begins investigating when her body is lost. This leads him to discover her audio recordings of her coverage of events such as the Kursk submarine explosion and the Moscow theatre hostage crisis. Renko falls in love with the voice on the tapes and becomes obsessive in his investigation. A large part of the plot centers around a notebook written in code but this is mostly a macguffin. As a procedural it really didn't have enough actual investigation and I didn't get much of a sense of urgency. The resolution is very open-ended which I liked; this isn't a whodunnit to be solved by pointing a finger or killing someone.
Tatiana is an entertaining read and the dialogue and characters are fresh. I enjoyed going to Wikipedia to check references in the book such as the House of Soviets in Kaliningrad. (They really did just paint it blue for Putin's visit)
I loved Gorky Park which is the only other Arkady Renko novel I've read. Tatiana is a much lighter read. It lacks the depth and complexity of Gorky Park leaving mostly just the trappings of a typical hard-boiled story. I thought there were too many tangents for such a short novel but that tends to happen in a series. That being said you don't need to read any of the previous books to get Tatiana.
The book provides a view of modern Russia through the eponymous subject of Renko's investigation and her reporting on corruption in finance and government. The character Tatiana is based on Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist murdered in 2006. Tatiana's murder is officially ruled a suicide but Renko begins investigating when her body is lost. This leads him to discover her audio recordings of her coverage of events such as the Kursk submarine explosion and the Moscow theatre hostage crisis. Renko falls in love with the voice on the tapes and becomes obsessive in his investigation. A large part of the plot centers around a notebook written in code but this is mostly a macguffin. As a procedural it really didn't have enough actual investigation and I didn't get much of a sense of urgency. The resolution is very open-ended which I liked; this isn't a whodunnit to be solved by pointing a finger or killing someone.
Tatiana is an entertaining read and the dialogue and characters are fresh. I enjoyed going to Wikipedia to check references in the book such as the House of Soviets in Kaliningrad. (They really did just paint it blue for Putin's visit)