I picked up Gorky Park at the library because I had been wanting to read Polar Star, its sequel, again.I listened to Polar Star on tape years ago on a road trip to Burning Man and it was grippingly real, gritty, rusty and bloody. Murder on a Russian fishing vessel out in the Arctic. I felt as if ...
Havana Bay is the fourth novel in Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels. The first, Gorky Park, is a well known book that was made into a well known film. I haven’t read any of the previous Arkady Renko novels (they’re set in Russia, this book is set in Cuba, which is why I chose it) but I quic...
The Arkady Renko series from Martin Cruz Smith has to be the most chronologically dispersed series I have ever seen. It began with Gorky Park in 1981 and has continued up to 2010 with Three Stations, and in those 30 intervening years there have been only seven novels total. But true to the old ...
This is half way between 4 and 5, actually. This hard cover was on a remainder table for $5 when the original Canadian price was $41 and the US price was $26 in 2002. I'm only saying that book prices are determined by some sort of voodoo. The date referred to in the title and backed by the Japane...
Over the years, I made two trips to the Soviet Union. The first time was in 1965, in the course of a four-month knockabout through the USSR, Eastern and Central Europe, and Scandinavia before my Peace Corps service started. (That was the trip during which I was threatened by East German Vopos (Vo...
In Rob Nixon's superb book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor he asserts that there isn't a great anti-oil novel/movement the same way there's a great body of anti-coal/industrialization literature. That might be a fair assertion. But then I read Martin Cruz Smith's Nightwing, whi...
Smith published this book directly after his big hit, 'Gorky Park.' However, it never achieved that much success. Reading it, I can see why. It's an interesting concept, but not necessarily wholly successful.It's an historical novel about a Native American man, Joe Pena, in the US military who is...
Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko books are a series of mysteries set at various points in late 2oth century Russian history, starting with the last death throes of Communism. This is the second book in the series. I’ve read Stalin’s Ghost (#6) and watched the film version of Gorky Park (#1). H...