Three strikes for Mr Smith

Title: Three Stations
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

1/5

Back in 2008, I read a fantastic article in National Geographic by Mr Smith, "Moscow Never Sleeps". In the article, he plays on the contrast between the outrageous wealth of Russia's nouveau riche and the sorrowful squalor of society's least fortunates, geographically embodied in the part of Moscow known as Three Stations.

"Three Stations", the novel, is basically that article turned into a book, minus the focus and editing, 30 times longer but many times less interesting. It's social commentary masquerading as a crime novel, and doing neither with any particular distinction.

The seventh outing for Mr Smith's Moscow police investigator, Arkady Renko, packs a surfeit of plots into its slimmish 240 pages. There's a runaway teenage prostitute, whose baby has been stolen. There's a pair of hired killers looking to bring her back to the whorehouse. A kindly teenage street gang. A murderer obsessed with ballet.

What there isn't is a coherent story line stringing all these plot points together. Characters are introduced, only to vanish for chapters on end. The abducted baby and a murdered ballerina fight for space, and as a result neither story line feels fully developed. Also missing is the coherent social commentary that marks Mr Smith's other works, including his National Geographic article.

Renko this time is almost a parody of the established character--still the only one who believes a crime has been committed, still fighting with his boss, still bemused stepdad to chess prodigy Zhenya, still hooking up with women in passionless encounters (his girlfriend of the last two books has conveniently disappeared, for reasons not immediately obvious). There are the odd glimmers of Mr Smith's trademark dark wit, but mostly this Renko feels locked in a holding pattern, like a car in a traffic jam on Moscow's ring road.

The end result is a bit like "Indiana Jones 4". Or "Blair Witch 2" or "Son of Mask". In short, a poorly-written sequel that does its best to kill whatever good memories you had of the works that came before.

If the plot is a mess, the editing is worse. Mr Smith keeps forgetting to tell us things. An old woman appears; "It was the babushka who had been suffering the crumbs of the priest"--but Mr Smith never said there was a babushka with the priest. A bad guy is nasitly disemboweled by a hero who magically appears in just the right spot--but quite how this feat is managed is never entirely clear.

"Three Station" was almost physically painful to read, especially since I have long been an enormous fan of Mr Smith and his Renko books (read my reviews of "Wolves Eat Dogs" and "Stalin's Ghost"). Read Mr Smith's earlier Renko books, especially "Wolves Eat Dogs", read the National Geographic article, but whatever you do, don't read this.