Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith

Investigator Arkady Renko is back in Moscow. The remarkable hero of Gorky Park and Polar Star has been in exile, first on the run in Siberia, then in the Bering Sea on a Russian factory ship servicing American fishing trawlers. The city he returns to, the city he last knew when he was head of the homicide department of the Moscow prosecutor's office, is totally different from the one he left. Now the Communist Party is dead, the ruble is worthless, and organized crime is the only entity that functions efficiently in the city. The Russian mafia isn't merely fattening off the economy; it is the economy, the only part of the country that works.

At a black market Arkady meets an underworld banker minutes before the man and his car erupt in flames. As burning dollars and deutsche marks rain down around him, Arkady begins an investigation that leads him not only to the most powerful figures in Moscow today, its mafia chiefs, but also to the great love of his life, Irina Asanova.

The new lords of the city are Borya Gubenko, Sportsman of the Russian Republic turned black marketeer, and Makhmud, the aged leader of the Chechens, the Sicilians of the Russian mafias. There is also the sleek Max Albov, who has defected to the West and back to Moscow, a man who goes wherever the money is, as well as various Party commissars greedily plundering the last assets of the Soviet Union. Caught between them is Arkady, the uncrushable Slav ironist, who can't help wondering whether being an honest man in a bankrupt system isn't a wasted life.

From the smoldering site of the fire Arkady rescues a shortwave radio, and on it he later hears Irina Asanova reading the news about the Soviet Union on Radio Liberty, and emigre station based in Germany. Of course the news is no news to him, but Arkady listens to it like a man who has come back to life. Irina was the cause of his imprisonment and exile, while for her he was the price of her freedom. Now he listens to her as if she were lying in bed next to him.

As Moscow collapses around Arkady like a burning house, he escapes to Irina and to Germany - a new Germany at once Teutonically efficient and frighteningly corrupt - only fo find the Russian mafia already on hand, enjoying the country's good beer, driving BMWs through the Brandenburg Gate, and searching murderously for Investigator Renko, that familiar fugitive, whose destiny is once more to find his lost love and suffer again. - Book Jacket

Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith

Arkady Renko has made too many enemies and now he toils in obscurity on a Russian factory ship in the middle of the Bering Sea. But when a female crew member is picked up dead with the day's catch, Arkady becomes obsessed with the case and once again discovers more than he wants to know and certainly more than he bargained for.... - Barnes and Noble

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it. - SBCL

Don't forget to check out the DVD.

Author: Martin Cruz Smith

Arkady described how the breath of a reindeer herd crystallized and fell like snow. He talked about salmon runs on Sakhalin, the white-headed eagles of the Aleutians and waterspouts that danced around the Bering Sea. He'd never thought before of what a catalog of experiences his exile had brought to him, how unique and beautiful they were, what clear evidence that on no day could a man be sure he should not open his eyes.

They had a lunch of microwaved pizza. Delicious.

He told her how the first wind of the day approaching through the taiga made the million trees shiver like black birds taking flight. He talked about oil field fires that burned year-round, beacons that could be seen from the moon. He described walking from trawler to trawler across the Arctic ice. Sounds and sights not afforded most investigators.

They had red wine.

He talked about workers on the "slime line," the dark hold where fish were gutted in a factory ship, and how each individual was a separate mind with a fantasy unconfined by gunwales or decks - a defender of the Party who had taken to the sea in search of romance, a botanist who dreamed of Siberian orchids, each person a lamp on a separate world.

After finishing the wine, they had brandy.

He described the Moscow he had found on his return. Center stage, a dramatic battlefield of warlords and entrepreneurs; behind it, as still as a painted backdrop, eight million people standing in line. Yet there were moments, the occasional dawn when the sun was low enough to find a golden river and blue domes, and the entire city seemed redeemable. - From Red Square