Tatiana

"You're a secret romantic," she said.

"I'm a cynic", Arkady said. "I believe in car wrecks, airline disasters, missing children, self immolation, suffocation with pillows."

"What is it you don't believe in?"

"I don't believe in saints. They get people killed."

---

"It would be a treat to watch the evening news with Martin Cruz Smith’s fabulist’s eye and see current events colorized through Renko’s dramatic filter. In Tatiana, Smith continues the tradition he began at the end of the Brezhnev era with Gorky Park, using Russia as his game board to make geopolitical conspiracy well…fun."

- New York Times Book Review

"Riveting… Smith spins a complex plot involving the Russian mafia, a teenage genius struggling to crack the code of Petrovna’s notebook, and an excursion to Kaliningrad… [T]he most intriguing 'character' after Renko is contemporary Russia—freer than it was at the height of the cold war, but at least as corrupt and vastly more unequal—into which Smith offers many insights."

- Publishers Weekly

"[Tatiana] is one of Smith’s strongest… Much has happened in the 30-plus years since Gorky Park: social and political upheaval, war in Chechnya, the emergence of a brutal class of criminal billionaires — and Smith’s stories continue to reflect those changes with wit, style and authority….[He] is that uncommon phenomenon: a popular and well-regarded crime novelist who is also a writer of real distinction. His prose is clear, precise and unobtrusively elegant, and his sense of character is unerring."

- Washington Post