Pun Salad

This is the sixth Arkady Renko novel from Martin Cruz Smith. Arkady is an investigator with the Moscow Police, but his superiors have little use for an honest detective. So he's put to the task of investigating sightings of Joe Stalin at the Chistiye Prudy station of the Moscow Metro. He's also investigating a possible murder-for-hire enterprise run by a couple of his co-workers, war heroes from the Second Chechen War. And finally, he's trying to hold together the sort-of family cobbled together from the previous book: girlfriend Eva, and the young chess prodigy Zhenya. As usual, Arkady's doggedness endears him to nobody, and puts him in dire physical peril.

Martin Cruz Smith is pretty dogged himself; his books are always impeccably researched and convey a powerful portrait of Russia and its people. One subplot involves the "diggers", groups that make a semi-hobby of digging up victims of World War II, carefully assigning them nationalities and probable causes of death. German soldiers executed by Russians, or Russians executed by Germans? Machine-gunned, or a single shot to the back of the head? It turns out that MIA Soviet soldiers were presumed to have defected to the Nazis, and their families subjected to disgrace; finding the right corpse can absolve things even today.

Russia: it's not like where you and I live.

Smith's also very good at modifying the usual genre-detective wisecrackery with dark Russian humor. It's a mix of Tolstoy and Chandler.