SO HARD to keep the characters straight. Still a compelling read. ( )

En las redes de un pesquero que faena en el mar de Bering aparece el cuerpo de una muchacha que pertenece a la tripulación del buque factoría soviético Estrella Polar. A bordo de éste, trabaja el marinero Arkady Renko, ex investigador de la oficina del fiscal de Moscú, apartado de su cargo por "motivos políticos". A pesar de ello, el capitán del barco le pide que investigue la muerte de la muchacha. Pese al dictamen oficial de suicidio, Renko indaga por su cuenta...

This was a slow-moving, atmospheric story with some great characters, especially Arkady Renko who I really got to like a lot. He was the protagonist from Gorky Park who was too much of an independent thinker for the Party. This is probably what makes him such a good investigator, but in the USSR, being a good party member trumps all.

So, he's been in a sort of exile, keeping a low profile working a terrible job on a fishing boat and trying to keep under the radar when he gets volunteered to investigate the death of a young woman who was found in the nets with the fish. Everyone wanted it to be ruled a suicide, but Renko didn't agree and would not let it go, even when a suicide note was conveniently found under her mattress that had been checked by a few people previously.

There is a lot of resistance to his investigations by some people, including one powerful man who Renko had apprehended in his former life as a detective. This man seems to be trying to kill him, whether out of revenge or to stop his investigation. We slowly learn of things that have been going on secretly, why the woman was murdered, and a few other confusing things that I had some trouble following at times.

I really liked the personalities and interactions of the characters. I find Russians to be really interesting, and from my fairly limited experience, the characters in the book seemed to capture those characteristics well.

One humorous part was when the ship stopped over at an American outpost in Alaska. The Russians all take advantage of being able to buy things that they can't get in Russia, especially without having to wait all day in line. One of them says to another that he heard the reason there are no lines is that the Americans can't afford to buy the goods. Probably heard that on Russian social media. ;-) ( )

I thought that Gorky Park was a good start but ultimately a bit hard to follow. Polar Star resolves all of those issues and makes for a really captivating mystery, with surprising, complex characters that really elevate the entire work. Setting the story on a fish butchery, for lack of a better term, floating in the Arctic Ocean could have made for yet another locked room mystery, but Smith strips it away layer by layer to reveal something greater than the sum of its parts. ( )

Almost finished and I'm so happy to have found these books. I love Arkady Renko, and who says Cold War mysteries died with the Fall of the Berlin Wall? Martin Cruz Smith's descriptions and actions of the Soviet Political Officers are so interesting and often, of course, very funny. ( )