THREE STATIONS
By Martin Cruz Smith, Simon & Schuster, 243 pages, $29.99
I didn't think this series could get any better than Stalin's Ghost, the last Arkady Renko novel. But Martin Cruz Smith has surprised and delighted me once more. Three Stations is as brilliant a crime novel as you are likely to read. It's also a very serious examination of the social problems afflicting the Russian people as they move from their communist past to their possibly democratic future. Historians are already hard at work on their analyses, but Cruz Smith has his own unique perspective.
Victor, Arkady's partner and friend, puts it thus: “I read in the paper about two dolphins trying to drown a man … someplace. You always hear about noble dolphins saving someone. … Not this time; they were pushing him out to sea. … what was different about the poor bastard. It turned out he was Russian. … Why does the reverse of the normal always happen to us?”
“Maybe we should make it official,” Arkady said. “Russia is upside down.”
The world turned up here is a dead woman in a filthy trailer parked at Moscow's main rail terminal, the Three Stations. It's presumed she was a prostitute murdered by a client. No one in the police is very concerned, least of all Renko's bosses. But Renko is convinced there is more dangerous event here, possibly even a serial killer, even though his bosses keep telling him that isn't possible.
Meanwhile, Zhenya, his adopted son, has moved out and is living on the street, playing chess for money. He meets up with a girl whose baby has been abducted from the train, and the two teenagers find themselves adrift in a world where life is literally cheaper than dirt. In this world, children are commodities, bought and sold and, when used up, killed.
As always, Cruz Smith manages to take readers right into the heart of Russian society, where one side fights for a meagre life and the other attends a charitable event where billionaires bid on precious jewels and trips into space, raising millions for “the needy,” all the while ignoring the misery just steps from their exclusive clubs.
This novel has it all. One of the best of the year, for sure.
I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE
By Laura Lippman, Morrow, 384 pages, $29.99
Laura Lippman is one of those uncommonly talented authors whose work continues to get better in every book she writes. I'd Know You Anywhere is a riveting psychological suspense novel.
Eliza Benedict has a comfortable life with her successful husband and two children. One day a letter arrives that threatens it all. The man who kidnapped and raped her 20 years before has seen her picture in a magazine. “I'd know you anywhere,” he writes from his cell on death row. He wants to talk to her. Eliza sees her carefully built world collapsing in the cold light of tabloid journalism and unwanted notoriety. There is, however, much more to the story of Eliza and the man who snatched her and destroyed her innocence. Why did he let her live when he killed the other girls he abducted? Some people believe Eliza was no victim, but rather an active perpetrator. Just what did happen all those years ago? And what does a convicted rapist and murderer want with her now? Confession? Absolution?
Lippman loosely based this spellbinding tale on a true crime. It figures. The story is too vicious, too cruel, to be pure fiction.
BLEED FOR ME
By Michael Robotham, Sphere, 418 pages, $24.99
Michael Robotham writes terrifying thrillers about ordinary people faced with evil. What's remarkable is that, despite his scary subjects, his characters, even the cruel ones, are understandable, if not likeable. That's absolutely the case with Bleed for Me, which blends murder, child abuse and racism into a sensational tale.
