Smith finds haunted new Russia

Stalin's Ghost" (Simon & Schuster, 333 pages, $26.95) — Martin Cruz Smith: In Martin Cruz Smith's snowy Russia, the bodies only stay buried until the ground thaws. Senior Investigator Arkady Renko's problem is that he doesn't know when to stop digging once they appear.

Through Renko's bleary eyes, Smith has chronicled the death throes of the Soviet Union, reverberating from Moscow's Gorky Park deep into the Arctic Circle, the shadow of the fallen Berlin Wall, communist Havana and the sarcophagus hiding Chernobyl.

The latest thriller featuring the chain-smoking investigator finds the specter of the past haunting the new Russia. Round-the-clock construction to upgrade a Soviet-era Moscow courthouse unearths a mass grave of Josef Stalin's victims. Then Stalin himself appears to linger at a subway stop.

Assigned to chase down Stalin's phantom, Renko instead stalks a fellow detective — a Russian army hero from the Chechen battlefields, and rival for his companion's love. The rival is also a rising political star whose campaign appears increasingly built on ghosts: Stalin's heroic visage, and the consecutive deaths of former squad members who know too much about a celebrated skirmish on a Chechen bridge. A campaign photo op is staged around a World War II mass grave, one war's horrors glossing over the atrocities of another.

Smith doesn't rely on outrageous twists to advance the plot. Sometimes the greatest mystery is how Renko manages to keep his job under a superior who barely tolerates his attention to detail. Renko's reward for being shot on duty is exile from gleaming Moscow to remote, rural Russia: "No Mercedes, no Bolshoi, no sushi, no paved-over world; instead mud, geese, apples rolling off a horse cart."

Renko's stubborn investigation reveals more about how deeply he remains haunted by his father, a famously bloodthirsty general and friend of Stalin's. He keeps digging, never sure if it's his own grave or a way out of the ghost story he's living.

As always, Smith elevates a police procedural story to a taste of Russia, a glass of vodka poured quivering to the brim.

source : news.yahoo.com