The body, what was left of it, was drifting in Havana Bay the morning Arkady arrived from Moscow. The Cubans insisted that the body was his friend, Pribluda, but Arkady wasn't so sure.

Tokyo, 1922: Harry Niles is a "wild child", an American boy in a strange country, ignored by his missionary parents. So Harry begins to lead his own life in the Tokyo underworld. One night, he is charged with delivering a painting to an enigmatic figure, the samurai Ishigami. It is an encounter that will haunt Harry Niles forever.

Investigator Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Moscow prosecutor's office, has been assigned the thankless job of investigating a new phenomenon: late-night subway riders report seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin on the platform of the Chistye Prudy Metro station. The illusion seems part political hocus-pocus and also part wishful thinking, for among many Russians Stalin is again popular - the bloody dictator can boast a two-to-one approval rating.

At first, the case of the bodies found in a Moscow park looked straightforward: a "troika", probably three on a bottle, drunk together and then frozen to death together in the brutal Russian night. But Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko hits a sharp and complicated turn with the arrival of the KGB's Pribluda. Suddenly, his access to a routine investigation is blocked. Why?

While investigating the death of one of Russia's top entrepreneurs, Renko, the chronically melancholic senior investigator in Moscow, follows a trail that eventually leads him to the desolate area of Chernobyl. In this bizarre wasteland, things might just be looking up for Renko.

From Martin Cruz Smith, "a master of the international thriller," comes an audacious novel of exotic locales, intimate intrigues, and the mysteries of the human heart. "A superb thriller and a remarkable evocation of a place," raves Booklist in a starred review. "A moving, believable love story in which individual lives are invested with great dignity, even in the face of national ideals."