‘Three Stations’ by Martin Cruz Smith

If there’s one thing you can count on in the world of adult fiction, where formulaic stories and big-name authors rule, it’s that Martin Cruz Smith can still produce a gripping story.

A story set in Russia. A story that involves crime, politics and sketchy characters. A story that many casual American readers would ignore when perusing a bookstore.

Well, give “Three Stations” more than a second glance. Read it and enjoy it, because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year. It’s
mysterious, exciting and full of observations about modern Russia, which is still struggling to find itself 20 years after the collapse of
communism.

“Life would be wonderful without vodka, but since the world is not wonderful, people need vodka,” says a drunken Moscow detective. “Vodka is in our DNA. … Russians are perfectionists. That’s our curse. It makes for great chess players and ballerinas and turns the rest of us into jealous inebriates.”

For avid Smith readers, “Three Stations” is the latest installment in the Arkady Renko series, which began 30 years ago with the famous “Gorky Park.” Renko is a detective whose genius is unmatched and often underappreciated. But a post-communist Russia, which has taken a big dose of capitalism, presents new challenges for Renko.

As the story begins, a 15-year-old prostitute named Maya has fled a rural brothel and heads to Moscow on a train. When she awakes at the giant Three Stations depot in the nation's capital, the baby has been kidnapped by an unknown assailant(s).

Maya has no money and no one to turn to — at first. But Zhenya, a male teen chess prodigy, befriends her and vows to help find her baby. With nowhere to go, they eat and live in the crime-ridden station. Little does Maya know, however, the brothel has hired killers to hunt her and teach her and others a lesson about escaping.

In the meantime, Renko has been suspended from the prosecutor’s office but he jumps on a case involving a young dead woman, who was found at Three Stations. He links the death to the billionaires’ Nijinsky Fair, Russia’s premier charity ball. From there, he gets stuck in a case that keeps getting muddier and muddier. He meets Anya, a young journalist who is investigating the case, and romance blossoms. Renko eventually crosses paths with Maya, and their journeys, now blended, take some perilous turns.

In “Three Stations,” Smith creates a Dickensian world, with a strong Russian flavor, where foreigners (Tajiks and others from the eastern
regions) mix in with street urchins, gangs and the homeless in the bowels of Moscow while the emerging billionaire class is fearful of the
government’s crackdown on the oligarchs. Uncertainty, corruption and hopelessness reign.

It’s a haunting portrait of Russia in the early 21st century, and Smith makes it come alive with his lucid, succinct style that is sprinkled with cynicism, hope and courage.