Tatiana - Hardcover

'Muscovite Arkady Renko has long been the most persuasive of contemporary detectives...Tatiana, the eighth book in the series, is one of the most economical and polished...Cruz Smith can give us a landscape and a milieu with a crisp matter-of-factedness that poets would envy...He can make tension rise through the page like a shark's fin... The whole thing is at once grim and funny and beautifully done'Independent

'Smith made his reputation with the stunning 1981 blockbuster Gorky Park, set in Moscow with a hero, Inspector Arkady Renko, who was so gruff and drunk that he was impossible to forget. This eighth Renko novel stylishly tells the story of a female Russian investigative journalist who goes missing, and is clearly inspired by the killing of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. Told in Smith's polished prose, it demonstrates that Smith is still capable of superb stories' Daily Mail

'Smith expertly carries on his tradition of weaving geopolitical conspiracy into gripping fiction. A decoder ring could have helped readers crack that notebook's code on their own, but struggling slowly from benighted dread into glimmering dawn of resolution is a fair reward. Figuring things out too quickly would only spoil the game' Liesl Schillinger, The Scotsman

'The fast-paced, pared-back prose is very different from the dense realism of Gorky Park. But there's no diminution in quality or excitement. Dour, sardonic Renko is always a joy to be around, and the race-against-time climax, as Renko's chess-genius ward Zhenya struggles to crack the translator's code, is expertly handled' --Guardian

In his groundbreaking Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith created one of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko. In Tatiana, Smith delivers his most ambitious and politically daring novel since. When the brilliant and fearless young reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow in the same week that notorious mob billionaire Grisha Grigorenko is shot in the back of the head, Renko finds himself on the trail of a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia itself. The body of an elite government translator shows up on the sand dunes of Kalingrad: killed for nothing but a cryptic notebook filled with symbols. A frantic hunt begins to locate and decipher this notebook. In a fast-changing and lethal race to uncover what this translator knew, and how he planned to reveal it to the world, Renko makes a startling discovery that propels him deeper into Tatiana's past - and, at the same time, paradoxically, into Russia's future.