Stalin's Ghost

Stalin's Ghost reaffirms Martin Cruz Smith's place at the pinnacle of crime fiction.

It is a winter evening in Moscow and renovations to the cafeteria at the Supreme Court have been interrupted by the discovery of a mass grave. The victims' clothes date from the 1940s. The single bullet hole in the back of each skull indicates they were executed. In the new Russia of luxury car showrooms and all-night casinos, the old Russia keeps bobbing to the surface.

To avoid bad publicity and construction delays, traffic is diverted and clean-up crews work through the night to remove the bodies. Even so, the job may take longer than anticipated.

"That's always the problem, isn't it?" a passer-by says. "Once you start digging, where to stop?"

The man with the wry observation is Arkady Renko, a police investigator with a sharp sense of the inherent absurdity of his situation. He is passing a mass grave on his way to investigate the sighting of an apparition.

Renko is one of the most original creations of contemporary fiction. The protagonist of a series of novels that began in 1981 with Gorky Park, he has lived through the terminal years of the Soviet Union, glasnost and perestroika, coup and counter-coup, the end of the socialist bloc and the rise of the mafia billionaires.

He has even chased a case into the radioactive wasteland around the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Through every swerve of recent Russian history, he has remained an honest cop in a place where the law is mutable. Now he must confront an attempt to turn back the hands of time.

The ghost of Joseph Stalin has started appearing on the platform of a Moscow subway station. And in Russia, even phantoms have a political significance. Uncle Joe is still a popular figure, after all, and the iron-fisted certainties he represents are a marketable commodity. There are many in the new Russia who still hanker for the bad old days.

On the face of it, the sightings seem no more than the group hallucinations of nostalgic old soldiers and heroine mothers. But Renko, himself the son of one of the dictator's bloodiest generals, soon sniffs out the involvement of a pair of American media specialists. Their client is Nikolai Isakov, a hero of the war in Chechnya, the leader of an elite squad who wiped out an entire band of enemy rebels.

Isakov has political ambitions. He is also sharing the bed of Dr Eva Kazan, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking medico that Renko hooked up with in Chernobyl. To compound the issue, Isakov is a homicide detective, ideally placed to disrupt any investigation into the suspicious deaths of some of his former comrades in arms. When Renko refuses to be warned off the case, he finds himself being garrotted with piano wire by a mail-order bride at a meeting of superannuated communists.