Three Stations (Arkady Renko Series #7)
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A passenger train hurtling through the night. An unwed teenage mother headed to Moscow to seek a new life. A cruel-hearted soldier looking furtively, forcibly, for sex. An infant disappearing without a trace. So begins Martin Cruz Smith’s masterful Three Stations, a suspenseful, intricately constructed novel featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. For the last three decades, beginning with the trailblazing Gorky Park, Renko (and Smith) have captivated readers with detective tales set in Russia. Renko is the ironic, brilliantly observant cop who finds solutions to heinous crimes when other lawmen refuse to even acknowledge that crimes have occurred. He uses his biting humor and intuitive leaps to fight not only wrongdoers but the corrupt state apparatus as well. In Three Stations, Renko’s skills are put to their most severe test. Though he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor’s office for once again turning up unpleasant truths, he strives to solve a last case: the death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction trailer on the perimeter of Moscow’s main rail hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose to everyone—except to Renko, whose examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia’s premier charity ball, the billionaires’ Nijinksy Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of Moscow’s rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the face of Putin’s crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power. Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect. In Three Stations, Smith produces a complex and haunting vision of an emergent Russia’s secret underclass of street urchins, greedy thugs and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and fear. The Barnes & Noble ReviewAs Cruz Smith draws his parallel plot lines together neatly if a little hastily, he creates bold sketches of a previously grey world thrown into sudden, garish disorder. "We were the idiots who put this lizard in power," a billionaire oligarch complains of Vladimir Putin, who is seen as betraying his paymasters. In a Russia that now spawns killers with "eyes deep as drains," even political corruption is not what it used to be.
Preface David Crystal Crystal, DavidI Developing techniques, training and traitsMethods, training, remuneration, social and personal characteristics 3II Lone WorkersBernardo Machiavelli 21Ludovico Dolce 23John Marbeck 25Conrad Gessner 27Joseph Justus Scaliger 29John Florio 31Henry Oldenburg 33Samuel Pepys 35John Dunton 37Alexander Cruden 41John Hill 45Giuseppe Garampi 47Samuel Ayscough 51Eduard Buschmann 55William Poole 57Charlotte Yonge 59Lewis Carroll 61Samuel Palmer 65Percy Fitzgerald 67Henry B. Wheatley 71Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 75Frederick Howard Collins 77Sir Edward Cook 79Beatrice Webb 83Nancie Baily 87Norman Douglas 89Mary Petherbridge 93Stella Browne 99Theodora Bosanquet 101Gordon V. Carey 103Gertrude Boyle 105Gilfred Norman Knight 109Esmond de Beer 113Frederick A. Pottle 115John Edwin Holmstrom 117Margaret Anderson 121Frances Partridge 125Georgette Heyer 127William S. Heckscher 131Robert Latham 135Barbara Pym 137Gerald Fowler 141Hans Wellisch 145BevAnne Ross 151Oliver Stallybrass 153Douglas Matthews 157John Vickers 161Elizabeth Moys 165Ken Bakewell 167Cherry Lavell 171Christine Shuttleworth 175Norma Whitcombe 179Drusilla Calvert 181Oula Jones 185Tom Norton 189Michael Brackney 193Linda Fetters 197Geraldine Beare 201Frances Lennie 205Laura Gottlieb 209Bella Hass Weinberg 213Jan Ross 217Laurence Errington 221Nancy Mulvany 225Michael Robertson 229III Banding TogetherThe Index Society, 1877-90 233Other early groups 237Society of IndexersThe first ten years, 1957-67 241Three affiliations: American SI, Australian SI, IAS Canada 2501968-77 2601978-82 2701983-87 2771988-91 2821992-95 291The end of print-only indexing 297The Indexer, 1958-95 299Editorials in The Indexer, 1958-95 303Obituaries in The Indexer, 1958-95 305Chronology of print-only indexing 307References 311Acknowledgements 317Index 321
