Three Stations (Arkady Renko Series #7) »

Best known for the Moscow detective novel Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith is also known for delivering stories of crime, conspiracy and intrigue featuring protagonists whose loyalties are sometimes murky. Whether he is dramatizing history or fashioning his own facts, Smith fills his deeply researched novels with a sense of darkness underneath the detail.

A passenger train hurtling through the night. An unwed teenage mother headed to Moscow to seek a new life. A cruel-hearted soldier looking furtively, forcibly, for sex. An infant disappearing without a trace. So begins Martin Cruz Smith’s masterful Three Stations, a suspenseful, intricately constructed novel featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. For the last three decades, beginning with the trailblazing Gorky Park, Renko (and Smith) have captivated readers with detective tales set in Russia. Renko is the ironic, brilliantly observant cop who finds solutions to heinous crimes when other lawmen refuse to even acknowledge that crimes have occurred. He uses his biting humor and intuitive leaps to fight not only wrongdoers but the corrupt state apparatus as well. In Three Stations, Renko’s skills are put to their most severe test. Though he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor’s office for once again turning up unpleasant truths, he strives to solve a last case: the death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction trailer on the perimeter of Moscow’s main rail hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose to everyone—except to Renko, whose examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia’s premier charity ball, the billionaires’ Nijinksy Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of Moscow’s rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the face of Putin’s crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power. Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect. In Three Stations, Smith produces a complex and haunting vision of an emergent Russia’s secret underclass of street urchins, greedy thugs and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and fear.

The Barnes & Noble Review

As Cruz Smith draws his parallel plot lines together neatly if a little hastily, he creates bold sketches of a previously grey world thrown into sudden, garish disorder. "We were the idiots who put this lizard in power," a billionaire oligarch complains of Vladimir Putin, who is seen as betraying his paymasters. In a Russia that now spawns killers with "eyes deep as drains," even political corruption is not what it used to be.

Preface David Crystal Crystal, David

I Developing techniques, training and traits

Methods, training, remuneration, social and personal characteristics 3

II Lone Workers

Bernardo Machiavelli 21

Ludovico Dolce 23

John Marbeck 25

Conrad Gessner 27

Joseph Justus Scaliger 29

John Florio 31

Henry Oldenburg 33

Samuel Pepys 35

John Dunton 37

Alexander Cruden 41

John Hill 45

Giuseppe Garampi 47

Samuel Ayscough 51

Eduard Buschmann 55

William Poole 57

Charlotte Yonge 59

Lewis Carroll 61

Samuel Palmer 65

Percy Fitzgerald 67

Henry B. Wheatley 71

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 75

Frederick Howard Collins 77

Sir Edward Cook 79

Beatrice Webb 83

Nancie Baily 87

Norman Douglas 89

Mary Petherbridge 93

Stella Browne 99

Theodora Bosanquet 101

Gordon V. Carey 103

Gertrude Boyle 105

Gilfred Norman Knight 109

Esmond de Beer 113

Frederick A. Pottle 115

John Edwin Holmstrom 117

Margaret Anderson 121

Frances Partridge 125

Georgette Heyer 127

William S. Heckscher 131

Robert Latham 135

Barbara Pym 137

Gerald Fowler 141

Hans Wellisch 145

BevAnne Ross 151

Oliver Stallybrass 153

Douglas Matthews 157

John Vickers 161

Elizabeth Moys 165

Ken Bakewell 167

Cherry Lavell 171

Christine Shuttleworth 175

Norma Whitcombe 179

Drusilla Calvert 181

Oula Jones 185

Tom Norton 189

Michael Brackney 193

Linda Fetters 197

Geraldine Beare 201

Frances Lennie 205

Laura Gottlieb 209

Bella Hass Weinberg 213

Jan Ross 217

Laurence Errington 221

Nancy Mulvany 225

Michael Robertson 229

III Banding Together

The Index Society, 1877-90 233

Other early groups 237

Society of Indexers

The first ten years, 1957-67 241

Three affiliations: American SI, Australian SI, IAS Canada 250

1968-77 260

1978-82 270

1983-87 277

1988-91 282

1992-95 291

The end of print-only indexing 297

The Indexer, 1958-95 299

Editorials in The Indexer, 1958-95 303

Obituaries in The Indexer, 1958-95 305

Chronology of print-only indexing 307

References 311

Acknowledgements 317

Index 321