Word: renko
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...under the thumb of a totalitarian regime, but he meets associates for a beer after work, flirts with telephone operators and fends off the elderly widows in his apartment building who want to hitch him to a suitable bride. Just as Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko detective novels stripped the cold war thriller of much of its ideological baggage, A Corpse in the Koryo is, in many ways, a street-level look at life in the Hermit Kingdom with nary a mention of mass games or nuclear weapons. "Anyone bold enough to try to discuss the North in nonjudgmental...
...Arkady Renko, the admirable outcast cop of Gorky Park, is a man of northern mists and bureaucratic permafrost. What's he doing in Havana? And why does he walk the streets sunk in gloom, a parody Russian, wearing that heavy overcoat? One question at a time: Havana because he's looking into the death of a colleague (the Cubans, fed up with Russians, want him to identify the body and scram--but no, Renko investigates); the sweltering coat because it is a last gift from his wife, dead of medical bungling in Moscow. The story is all amiable, well-told...
...seductive tease. She won't go to his apartment because it "lacks poetry," yet she proposes a two-day affair in which they'll play tourists in their own town. Rohmer adds a sour twist, but the enveloping mood is genial, the body language eloquent, the two players (Serge Renko, Aurore Rauscher) expert entrancers. One wants to bottle this episode; it's the perfect little gift for lovers of film, of Paris and of love...
...Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California and for Martin Cruz Smith and the series that began with Gorky Park in Moscow. Smilla puts her nose in harm's way and gets it bloodied. Like Archer and like Smith's Russian cop Arkady Renko, she keeps on poking. She's in peril in a glossy casino near Copenhagen, on a powerful, mysteriously equipped icebreaker plowing north toward Greenland, on the floating metal atoll of a huge fueling dock, and finally on the Greenland snow...
...Square, the third adventure of Arkady Renko, the Russian detective of Gorky Park and Polar Star, touches the imagination in a powerful, brooding way that seems very Russian. Give or take Richard Price's Clockers, a story of New Jersey cops and dope sellers that has some of the same strengths, it may be the best thriller to appear in several years. But Edmund Wilson's contemptuous dismissal of detective stories still lashes: Is it feebleminded to care who killed Roger Ackroyd...