If this is a Martin Cruz Smith mystery, we must be in Moscow, maybe in Gorky Park. But in a thrilling change of pace, THE SIBERIAN DILEMMA (Simon & Schuster, $27) takes us out of the city and into Russia’s untamed wilderness in search of a journalist who’s gone missing while on a dangerous, perhaps foolhardy, assignment. The case is of special importance to Smith’s detective, Arkady Renko, because the reporter, Tatiana Petrovna, is his lover. Tatiana’s boss, Sergei Obolensky, publisher of the newsmagazine Russia Now, laughingly dismisses Arkady as an anxious boyfriend, but Arkady is well aware of the dangers facing Russian journalists. If it isn’t a cup of poisoned tea today, it could be a shot between the eyes tomorrow.
By coincidence, Arkady has been given a new assignment. “How do you feel about Siberia?” is his unwelcome introduction to the job. All he has to do, the prosecutor explains, is go to Irkutsk, collect a potential murderer and take him to a transit prison to be prosecuted. But Arkady turns this job into a mission to find his woman.
Meanwhile, life and crime go on in Moscow. Some bones have been found at an excavation; political provocateurs are demonstrating on a bridge; a pair of idealistic new zookeepers have liberated two bears from their cages. But for Arkady, the most alarming news is that Tatiana’s office has been trashed. Surely this has something to do with her assignment to cover Mikhail Kuznetsov, a reformist oligarch who is thinking of running against Putin for president.
The plot diffuses into several subplots, but so long as we keep our sights on Arkady, everything makes perfect sense. Smith’s lucid prose, surprising imagery and realistic dialogue, as well as his wonderfully quirky characters, all serve his engrossing storytelling. But in the end what linger in your mind are the voices — of people who never knew they had so much to say and never dreamed their voices mattered.
♦
You can’t beat a murder when it comes to jazzing up a coming-of-age story. Boady Sanden, the endearing 15-year-old narrator of Allen Eskens’s stunning small-town mystery, NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS (Mulholland, $27), has pretty much resigned himself to being bullied. But if he makes it through his freshman year of high school in Jessup, Mo., Boady and his friend Thomas Elgin, son of the newly hired African-American manager of a local manufacturing plant, will be free to investigate a tantalizing mystery: the disappearance of Lida Poe.
Local gossip has it that Lida, a young African-American woman smart enough to be going places, was stupid enough to steal a whole lot of money from her employer and skip town. Boady and Thomas aren’t falling for that story, and they make it their business to find out what really happened. Eskens clearly has an affinity for clever boys like Boady and Thomas; but he also has lovely visions of the mighty trees and secret swimming holes that make them long for summer — and mysteries to solve.
♦
Maybe it’s just a touch of O.C.D., but I like to count things. Number of pages to the first murder. Total body tally at the end of the book. Like that. Although counting is usually relaxing, Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher novel, BLUE MOON (Delacorte, $28.99), gave me agita because I kept losing track of the bodies. The unusually busy plot involves a ruthless gang war between Albanian and Ukrainian mobsters, so a stack of corpses is only to be expected. But when more than a dozen fresh kills piled up at the last minute, I lost count. That’s a shame because a pivotal plot point — that both the Albanians and the Ukrainians rush to blame “the Russians” for Reacher’s acts of mischief — is pretty funny. As always, Child gets a charge out of flaunting Reacher’s impressive build, but he’s also unafraid to show his hero’s softer side. Here it’s the big guy’s gentle treatment of an old couple being squeezed by extortionist loan sharks. And for the first time in a long time, we get a real feeling for Reacher’s endless wandering: “No job, no home, always restless. Always moving. Just the clothes on his back.”
♦
Small towns relish a touch of Hollywood glamour, and in FAMOUS IN CEDARVILLE (Polis, $26), a clever little whodunit by Erica Wright, that local glamour girl is Barbara Lace, who regrettably happens to be dead when the novel opens. A remnant from the alluring era of screwball comedies and film noir, Lace was never a major star, but she left some potentially incendiary letters about “drunk leading men” and “promiscuous married ingénues” under the floorboards of her Tennessee home. “If the Music City Auction House had found these, they would have gone for a pretty penny,” says Samson Delaware, a local antiques restorer who plays amateur sleuth when Lace’s assistant is also murdered. Although the novel’s dialogue occasionally gets stuck in the speaker’s craw — “You’re an uncredited role, Delaware. An extra maybe that ends up on the cutting room floor” — Wright’s soft patina of nostalgia is kind to this part of the South, a region so depressed even the undertakers are going out of business.
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November 15, 2019 at 05:00PM
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Arkady Renko Has Been Sent to Siberia. And He’s Fine With That. - The New York Times
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