OurColony.net

John LeCarre move over!

Customer Rating:
Cruz Smith's best since Gorky Park. Protaganist, Arkady Renko, wounded though he is, manages to rise to the occasion in his pursuit of identifying a fellow Russian pulled from the waters of Havana Bay. Set in today's Cuba, with its beauty and crumbling decay wrought by years of communism, our hero teams up with a beautiful Cuban policewoman and becomes embroiled in a world where Russians are despised. Throw the rituals of Santeria into the mix and you have a recipe for murder, deceit, and perhaps reasons for Arkady to get his life back on track. A wonderful read with great characters!

not very interesting

Customer Rating:
and couldn't identify with any of the characters. the story was weak uninteresting and irrelevant. Only made it to about the 5th chapter

Arkady Renko Heads South - Way South

Customer Rating:
Arkady Renko began his fictional career as a Soviet militia (police) investigator. By the third book in the series Red Square, the Soviet Union had collapsed - into the dustbin of history as it were - and in the fourth installment he has traveled to Havana on his own dime to investigate the disappearance of an old `friend'. As the book opens, Renko is present at bay side when the Cuban police retrieve a grossly decayed body from the water. Is it Pribluda? And how has he died?

Renko, however, is distracted by his own more personal grief. Devastated by the death of his wife at the hands of incompetent Russian doctors, Renko prepares to kill himself in Havana. Just then Arkady is interrupted by Cubans trying to kill him, which rather oddly nudges him back toward life. He forms a liaison with beautiful Cuban detective Ofelia Osorio - a liaison which neither of them particularly desires. Russians are persona non grata in post-Soviet era Cuba, a country now cut off from its source of largesse.

Cuba seems shabby and run-down. We see otherwise good Communists dabbling in strange voodoo-like rituals. Nothing works very well, except perhaps the people (well some of them anyway). Old cars, iffy electricity, doubtful food supplies.

Renko and Osorio slowly unravel a complex web of intrigue. Along the way, Cruz Smith populates his book with various interesting characters including a wealthy ex-pat American (suggestive of Robert Vesco), a former black power American radical (modeled on William Lee Brent?), a homicidal police detective, and an ingenious, but devious pathologist. A plot if afoot to make a killing, millions of dollars and more, but how high does it go?

Good fun for fans of Arkady Renko, even if it is not the best book in the series.

Out of Place in Havana

Customer Rating:
Arkady Renko began his fictional career as a Soviet militia (police) investigator. By the third book in the series Red Square, the Soviet Union had collapsed - into the dustbin of history as it were - and in the fourth installment he has traveled to Havana on his own dime to investigate the disappearance of an old `friend'. As the book opens, Renko is present at bay side when the Cuban police retrieve a grossly decayed body from the water. Is it Pribluda? And how has he died?

Renko, however, is distracted by his own more personal grief. Devastated by the death of his wife at the hands of incompetent Russian doctors, Renko prepares to kill himself in Havana. Just then Arkady is interrupted by Cubans trying to kill him, which rather oddly nudges him back toward life. He forms a liaison with beautiful Cuban detective Ofelia Osorio - a liaison which neither of them particularly desires. Russians are persona non grata in post-Soviet era Cuba, a country now cut off from its source of largesse.

Cuba seems shabby and run-down. We see otherwise good Communists dabbling in strange voodoo-like rituals. Nothing works very well, except perhaps the people (well some of them anyway). Old cars, iffy electricity, doubtful food supplies.

Renko and Osorio slowly unravel a complex web of intrigue. Along the way, Cruz Smith populates his book with various interesting characters including a wealthy ex-pat American (suggestive of Robert Vesco), a former black power American radical (modeled on William Lee Brent?), a homicidal police detective, and an ingenious, but devious pathologist. A plot if afoot to make a killing, millions of dollars and more, but how high does it go?

Good fun for fans of Arkady Renko, even if it is not the best book in the series.

Havana Bay

Customer Rating:
Martin Cruz Smith has never dissapointed me and Havana Bay is simply splendid. People have labled his Renko series as part of the "spy" genre and that is selling them short. Renko has never been a spy but rather an everyman who happens to be a policeman with deep undercurrents and a painful personal life.

In Havana Bay he goes to Cuba to identify the remains of his "friend" a rough KGB type of the old school who declined to shoot Renko in a previous novel, he appears to have died naturally if accidentaly. Needless to say this is not the full story and soon he is deep in an internal Cuban plot with layers that seem impossible to reconcile but Cruz smith does it leaving no lose ends that spoil so many thrillers with improbability that simply defy reasonable probability.

From the effort of his hunt and a believable caring relationship he is again rejuvinated and I can't wait until Renko's next accident of life
is reported on.