Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
When Martin Cruz Smith published the first of the Arkady Renko detective novels in 1981, no one could foresee that the series would still be going strong more than forty years later. But so it is. The resilient Russian detective has survived a decade of tussles with the KGB under Leonid Brezhnev and his successors, then the tumultuous nineties with Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin. And now, in 2019, he continues to ply his craft in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He manages to outmaneuver his corrupt boss, Prosecutor Zurin, and keep his job as an Investigator of Special Cases despite the man’s efforts to sideline him. And at the outset of The Siberian Dilemma, the tenth book in the series, he has taken on a very special case indeed.
A trip to Siberia on a case that may be bogus
The assignment may seem to be a joke, but it’s nothing of the sort. Two large bears have escaped from their cage in the Moscow Zoo, and it’s up to Arkady to pacify them. But this will not be his only encounter with bears as the story unfolds. Far from it.
The Prosecutor’s latest move to get Arkady out of the way is an assignment to travel to Irkutsk in Siberia to close the case of a Chechen man who confessed to attempting to kill Zurin. Arkady imagines that there’s something fishy about the case, because, after all, it’s Zurin who’s given it to him. But he’s willing to make the long journey because his girlfriend, Tatiana, an investigative reporter, has failed to return from Irkutsk several days after her promised return.
However, when he arrives in city, he quickly learns that Tatiana is still very much alive and working on a story about one of the two billionaire oligarchs who dominate the region. The two men turn out to be friends, and friendly to boot. He learns, also, that the Chechen man he’s supposed to consign to life (or death) in the cold was not the man who tried to kill Zurin. Together with a flamboyant local man who calls himself a “factotum,” Arkady then involves himself with the two billionaires in hopes he can protect her from what seems like inevitable danger when they learn what she’s actually writing.
The Siberian Dilemma (Arkady Renko #9) by Martin Cruz Smith (2019) 285 pages ★★★★☆
A complicated life in the cold
There are complications galore in Arkady’s life. Not only does he have to fend off illegal orders from his boss and contend with his stubborn girlfriend but his seventeen-year-old adopted son, Zhenya, is causing headaches, too. The young man is a chess hustler, certain to embarrass the wrong man sometime soon. And now, in Siberia, Arkady is learning just how dangerous those billionaires can be. But he agrees to go on a bear hunt with one of them. And that proves to be a very big mistake. Siberia “was where strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner.”
About the author
Martin Cruz Smith was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1942 with the name Martin William Smith. (Cruz was his paternal grandmother’s surname.) His mother was an American Indian of Pueblo descent. He has been writing since the early 1970s under a large variety of pen names. But he is best known for the Arkady Renko series, of which there are now ten novels, but has written twenty-two other books. He lives in Marin County in California with his family.
For related reading
Although I’ve read all the other books in this series, I’ve reviewed here only four. They include the tenth, Independence Square (Arkady Renko in Ukraine), as well as the eighth, Tatiana (A crusading Russian journalist and the Mafia).
You’ll find somewhat similar novels at The best Russian mysteries and thrillers and Police procedurals spanning modern Russian history.
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