Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The disgraced investigator Arkady Renko (Gorky Park) has fled Moscow and found work on the Polar Star, a Soviet factory ship in the Gorbachev era. The US and USSR work jointly with American ships trawling the Bering Sea and the Soviet ship processing the catch. Then a woman’s body is hauled up in one of the nets along with tons of fish. It turns out to be one of the kitchen workers on the Star, a vamp who has been sleeping with several men. Why was she in the water and how did she die? It’s murder we find out, but then we have the questions of who, how, and why.
The author has penned another uplifting novel of the Soviet state. I say uplifting not because that is the tone of the story but because it is the exact opposite. The author has again captured the miasma of Soviet despair, cynicism, corruption, depression, greed and desperation that makes the American reader like me feel so lucky to have lived here and not there through that era. While the tone is mesmerizing at times, the plot becomes too hard to follow. There are too many characters, both Russian and American. The action scenes are well done, but too numerous and implausible. I was satisfied enough as I became immersed in the story, but in the end I can only give it a mediocre rating.