Tatiana ★★★★ ★

Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster, R240)

MARTIN Cruz Smith is now north of 70, and his soulful Moscow sleuth Arkady Renko is slipping (a little more slowly than the rest of us) into middle age. But don’t worry — neither of these toppies is going soft in the middle.

In Tatiana , the eighth edition in a series that began in 1981 with the superb Gorky Park, Inspector Renko is still slashing bravely at the hydra of Russia’s mafia/state nexus. And Cruz Smith’s writing is still percussively paced and bitterly funny.

What’s bothering Renko is the death, ostensibly by suicide, of an intrepid reporter, Tatiana Petrovna — and then the disappearance of her body from a state morgue. The trail leads him north to the naval enclave of Kaliningrad, a Cold War relic city wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Near the town he finds a peninsula that’s home to most of the world’s amber, plus some of the world’s creepiest people. The first and biggest lead that Renko comes across is a notebook of hieroglyphics — incomprehensible to everybody except the enigmatic translator who wrote it. Who is inconveniently dead.

It doesn’t help matters that a bullet is still lodged in Renko’s cranium and liable to veer off into his brain if he gets too stressed out. Or that his teenage ward Zhenya, a former street urchin and volatile chess prodigy, is suddenly determined to enlist in the Russian infantry — a spectacularly bad idea, in Renko’s experience.

To cap it off, Renko’s casual lover, a young newspaper reporter, has started to over-emphasise the casual aspect of their relationship, to the extent that she prefers to hobnob with a vicious mob heir. Soon Renko is navigating a baffling chess board peopled by skinheads, killers, oligarchs and rotten cops. Luckily, as always, the hero’s dipsomaniac sidekick Viktor Orlov is on hand to fight his corner.

Cruz Smith’s feel for the cruel energy of contemporary Muscovite life is utterly convincing. It takes chutzpah to occupy another country for so long and so utterly in your imagination, not least when you’re an American writer who is fictionalising (and critiquing) an increasingly jingoistic Russia.

But the Renko books sell in Russia, and he visits often. “I wouldn’t say I’m welcomed,” Cruz Smith told Publishers Weekly recently. “When I go to Russia, I’m usually pulled out of the line in customs and made to stand around for an hour or two. You have to look at things from both sides. A Russian writer who has been critical of, say, the FBI might not get a warm welcome in the US either.”

Me, I’d sooner have dealings with the FBI than the Russian security police. But both forces are a bunch of big girl’s blouses when compared to Inspector Arkady Renko’s enemies. — Carlos Amato @CarlosBAmato