Digging For Ghosts

As in the previous five books about Arkady Renko, beginning with the modern classic "Gorky Park" and continuing with 2004's "Wolves Eat Dogs," Martin Cruz Smith's new novel, "Stalin's Ghost" (Simon & Schuster, 333 pages, $26.95) provides an intense, close-up look at the "new" Russia, and it's not a pretty picture.

When the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union were torn apart, most of the people who craved democracy believed their lives would be immeasurably improved with the elimination of communism, that race for peasants in which everyone finishes first but nobody wins anything.

In a gentle, subtle, and sympathetic way, Mr. Smith has illustrated, in book after book, the sad truth that those who run Russia today are little different from those who were in charge in the old days. Much like Philip Kerr's Bernard Gunther, a good detective who simply tried to do his job within the restrictions of a confining and treacherous Nazi Germany, Renko maintains his integrity in spite of the utterly corrupt police department for which he works.

"Stalin's Ghost" is labyrinthine, and you need to pay close attention as numerous plot elements are introduced early. In the opening scene, a stylish woman interviews Renko and his honest partner, Victor, because she wants her husband killed and has been led to believe that hiring the police is the best way to accomplish it.

The policemen realize that they have uncovered a couple of criminals in the Moscow police department, Marat Urman and Nicolai Isakov, both former members of an elite fighting force, the Black Berets, who served with distinction in Chechnya. The situation becomes more complicated when Renko suspects, then knows, that his girlfriend, Eva, is cheating on him with Isakov.

At the same time, reports begin to flood the police and newspapers that people are spotting that smiling old granddad of Russia, Josef Stalin, at one of Moscow's subway stations, and Renko is sent to find out what it's all about.

When he is given the assignment, he is more than a little incredulous.

"You want me to find Stalin's ghost?" he asks his superior.

"In a nutshell," is the response. It quickly becomes evident that the Russian Patriots Party wants to make a comeback and is using the sightings of Stalin to aid its cause.

Isakov, as a popular war hero, is running for office on a platform of returning Russia to the good old days when it was a major world power. Renko's investigation into the murder-for-hire scheme, as well as covered-up murders of former Black Berets who served with Ivanov in Chechnya, place him at ever greater risk. He is threatened, assaulted, garroted, and shot, but relentlessly pursues his nemesis — partly to seek justice in a country that doesn't value it, and partly to win back Eva.

For more than a quarter of a century, Mr. Smith has been both a best-selling and one of the smoothest, most readable, and stylish authors in the mystery field. A large cast of characters interacts in this novel, which has a plot busier than a rat on a rope, but once you get used to the Russian names, each has a separate and easily identifiable personality, limned perfectly by the accomplished author.

Among the players are Zhenya, the chess prodigy unofficially adopted by Renko, who now lives on the street; Ilya Platonov, the Grand master, always drunk but a loyal friend to Zhenya and Arkady; Ginsberg, a Jewish hunchback photo-journalist whom Urman calls a dwarf but who says he is merely "abridged"; a couple of American consultants hired for Isakov's campaign; and Tanya, the gorgeous blond harpist who has many surprises in store for Renko (which I'd love to tell you about because they are colorful, but you should discover them for yourself).

At the murder scene of one of the Black Berets, his wife, so drunk she can barely stand, has improbably used a meat cleaver in a perfect arc onto her husband's neck. She soon turns up dead, too, and Renko looks at her body, described this way by Mr. Smith: "She was the indeterminate color of an old rug and possibly that was what she had been in life."

That is not an attractive epitaph, but Mr. Smith's vivid depiction of the corrupt and despairing country that often looks back to a time of terror as a better age than the present is not attractive either. That he can offer hope for a happy outcome for even a few of its inhabitants is a monumental achievement.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual "Best American Mystery Stories." He can be reached at otto penzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.