Martin Cruz Smith
From AwardAnnals
Information about the author.
Works
- 4 works
- Show titles only
Havana Bay: A Novel
Martin Cruz Smith
The body, at least what was left of it, was drifting in Havana Bay the morning Arkady arrived from Moscow. Only the day before, he had received an urgent message from the Russian embassy in Havana that his friend Pribluda was missing and asking that he come.
The Cubans insisted that this corpse floating in an inner tube was Pribluda, but Arkady wasn’t so sure.
“You don’t investigate assault, you don’t investigate murder. Just what do you investigate?” Arkady asks Ofelia Osorio, a detective in the Policía Nacional de la Revolución. “Or is it simply open…
Martin Cruz Smith
The American adventurer Jonathan Blair has been chased by scandal out of West Africa to the stranger land of Victorian England. Gin-soaked and shaking from malaria, he must travel to Wigan, a town in the darkest part of England, to solve the mysterious disappearance of a young cleric.
Nineteenth-century Wigan is two worlds. On the surface it is a serene baize-green land of the moneyed. But in the pits that reach a mile below the surface lurks a separate world where coal miners eke out their short, violent lives covered in black dust. And while the world on the…
Gorky Park: A Novel
Martin Cruz Smith
A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible—and tries to stay alive doing it.
Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel
Martin Cruz Smith
Investigator Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Moscow prosecutor’s office, has been assigned the thankless job of investigating a new phenomenon: late-night subway riders report seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin. The illusion seems part political hocus-pocus and also part wishful thinking, for Stalin is again popular. More so than Renko, whose lover, Eva, has left him for Detective Nikolai Isakov, a charismatic veteran of the civil war in Chechnya, a hero of the far right and, Renko suspects, a killer for hire. The cases entwine, and Renko’s quests become a personal inquiry fueled by jealousy.
The investigation leads to the fields of Tver, where once a million soldiers fought. There, amidst the detritus, Renko must confront the ghost of his own father, a favorite general of Stalin’s. In these barren fields, patriots and shady entrepreneurs—the Red Diggers and Black Diggers—collect the bones, weapons and personal effects of slain World War II soldiers, and find that even among the dead there are surprises.
