''A death is a tragedy, but an investigation is a political decision.''
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Following his "politically incorrect" investigation of several murders in Moscow's Gorky Park, the dour but conscientious Arkady Renko has been deprived of his Communist party membership and his job. After escaping from the psychiatric hospital where he was being "treated," he has taken a series of low-level jobs in remote areas of the Soviet Union, trying to stay under the political radar--working in a slaughterhouse, a construction site, and now, on the "slime line" of the Polar Star, a gigantic Soviet fishing ship on the Bering Sea, preparing and freezing fish. Co-operating with the Eagle, a smaller American ship, the Soviets are trying to find common ground for understanding, or so they say.
When Soviet fishermen bring up a netful of fish, they discover the body of a flirtatious young kitchen worker from the Polar Star. The political information officer aboard the ship immediately concludes that she has committed suicide, and the ship "doctor" is unable to determine a realistic time of death. The captain, however, decides he wants a real investigation, and he assigns Renko to investigate the manner and motivation for her death before the ship docks at Dutch Harbor.
Renko is a fascinating character--close to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in his feeling of entrapment by a chaotic world--but as he investigates, he begins to develop a sense of purpose, long missing from his life, and he soon discovers that no one and nothing are as they appear to be. The two ships' involvement in spying, counter-spying, smuggling, and drug manufacturing are revealed during the investigation of the young woman's death, and other deaths soon occur. Renko, unwilling to gloss over the truth, makes powerful enemies, both on the Soviet and on the American ship, and though he can accept his beatings by those in charge as a "normal" way of doing business by the authorities, his life, this time, is in mortal danger. Sadly, he accepts this, too, as "normal," and even his own death as inevitable.
Cruz Smith is astonishingly gifted in his ability to describe nature and convey atmosphere, and the cold and the fog near the Arctic Circle add to the bleak mood and the symbolism of an uncaring state. Renko himself, a solitary man, arouses sympathy in the reader as he tries to keep himself going in a system which often "suggests" that he play a different game from what he believes is right. The book lacks a love story to humanize or soften the harsh actions aboard the ship, however, and parts of the story are sometimes confusing. Actions often lead to surprising violence and over-the-top and unrealistic plot twists. This is a fine continuation of the Renko character, however, a character who will later appear in four more Cruz Smith novels. n Mary Whipple
Red Square (Arkady Renko Novels), #3 in the series
Havana Bay: A Novel (Mortalis.), #4
Wolves Eat Dogs (Arkady Renko Novels), #5
Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel, #6
December 6: A Novel
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