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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?
In many ways Niles should be as American as apple pie: raised by missionary parents, taught to respect his elders and be an honorable and upright Christian citizen dreaming of the good life on the sun-blessed shores of California. But Niles is also Japanese: reared in the aesthetics of Shinto and educated in the dance halls and backroom poker gatherings of Tokyo's shady underworld to steal, trick, and run for his life. As a gaijin, a foreigner - especially one with a gift for the artful scam - he draws suspicion and disfavor from Japanese police.
Venice, 1944. The war may be waning, but the city is still occupied and people all over Europe fear the power of the Third Reich. One night, under a sky of brilliant stars, a poor fisherman named Cenzo comes across a girl's body floating in the lagoon. He carries her into his boat and soon discovers that she is very much alive and very much in trouble: Born to a wealthy Jewish family who has been captured and deported by the Nazis, Guilia is on the run after she was found hiding in a local hospital.
At the Man with a Load of Mischief, they found the dead body stuck in a keg of beer. At the Jack and Hammer, another body was stuck out on the beam of the pub’s sign, replacing the mechanical man who kept the time. Two pubs. Two murders. One Scotland Yard inspector called in to help. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury arrives in Long Piddleton and finds everyone in the postcard village looking outside of town for the killer - except for one Melrose Plant....
In 1949 Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, was exposed as a communist spy and fled the country to vanish behind the Iron Curtain. Now, 12 years later, he has written his memoirs, a KGB-approved project almost certain to be an international best seller, and has asked his brother, Simon, a publisher, to come to Moscow to edit the manuscript. It's a reunion Simon both dreads and longs for.
In war-torn Yugoslavia, a beautiful young filmmaker and photographer - a veritable hero to her people - and a German officer have been brutally murdered. Assigned to the case is military intelligence officer Captain Gregor Reinhardt. Already haunted by his wartime actions and the mistakes he's made off the battlefield, he soon finds that his investigation may be more than just a murder, and that the late Yugoslavian heroine may have been much more brilliant - and treacherous - than anyone knew.
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?
In many ways Niles should be as American as apple pie: raised by missionary parents, taught to respect his elders and be an honorable and upright Christian citizen dreaming of the good life on the sun-blessed shores of California. But Niles is also Japanese: reared in the aesthetics of Shinto and educated in the dance halls and backroom poker gatherings of Tokyo's shady underworld to steal, trick, and run for his life. As a gaijin, a foreigner - especially one with a gift for the artful scam - he draws suspicion and disfavor from Japanese police.
Venice, 1944. The war may be waning, but the city is still occupied and people all over Europe fear the power of the Third Reich. One night, under a sky of brilliant stars, a poor fisherman named Cenzo comes across a girl's body floating in the lagoon. He carries her into his boat and soon discovers that she is very much alive and very much in trouble: Born to a wealthy Jewish family who has been captured and deported by the Nazis, Guilia is on the run after she was found hiding in a local hospital.
At the Man with a Load of Mischief, they found the dead body stuck in a keg of beer. At the Jack and Hammer, another body was stuck out on the beam of the pub’s sign, replacing the mechanical man who kept the time. Two pubs. Two murders. One Scotland Yard inspector called in to help. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury arrives in Long Piddleton and finds everyone in the postcard village looking outside of town for the killer - except for one Melrose Plant....
In 1949 Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, was exposed as a communist spy and fled the country to vanish behind the Iron Curtain. Now, 12 years later, he has written his memoirs, a KGB-approved project almost certain to be an international best seller, and has asked his brother, Simon, a publisher, to come to Moscow to edit the manuscript. It's a reunion Simon both dreads and longs for.
In war-torn Yugoslavia, a beautiful young filmmaker and photographer - a veritable hero to her people - and a German officer have been brutally murdered. Assigned to the case is military intelligence officer Captain Gregor Reinhardt. Already haunted by his wartime actions and the mistakes he's made off the battlefield, he soon finds that his investigation may be more than just a murder, and that the late Yugoslavian heroine may have been much more brilliant - and treacherous - than anyone knew.
For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch - hero, maverick, nighthawk - the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal. The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell.
New York Times best-selling author James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels began with this first hard-hitting entry in the series. In The Neon Rain, Detective Robicheaux fishes a prostitute's corpse from a New Orleans bayou and finds that no one, not even the law, cares about a dead hooker.
Virgil Flowers kicked around for a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He's been doing the hard stuff for three years now, but never anything like this.
France, July 1944: a month after the Allied landings in Normandy, and the liberation of Europe is under way. In the Pas-de-Calais, Nathalie Mercier, a young British Special Operations executive secret agent working with the French Resistance, disappears. In London, her husband, Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, discovers the truth about her role in the Allies' sophisticated deception at the heart of D-Day.
Maisie Dobbs isn't just any young housemaid. Through her own natural intelligence - and the patronage of her benevolent employers - she works her way into college at Cambridge. After the War I and her service as a nurse, Maisie hangs out her shingle back at home: M. DOBBS, TRADE AND PERSONAL INVESTIGATIONS. But her very first assignment soon reveals a much deeper, darker web of secrets, which will force Maisie to revisit the horrors of the Great War and the love she left behind.
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
Number one New York Times best-selling author Daniel Silva strikes again.
Mma "Precious" Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, making her the only female detective in the country. At first, cases are hard to come by. But eventually, troubled people come to Precious with a variety of concerns. Potentially philandering husbands, seemingly schizophrenic doctors, and a missing boy who may have been killed by witch doctors all compel Precious to roam about in her tiny van, searching for clues.
Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place: a corpse with a mouth full of sand, abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though it goes against his better judgment, Navajo tribal police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn cannot help but suspect the hand of a supernatural killer.
Seattle PD sex-crimes detective Livia Lone knows the monsters she hunts. Sold by her Thai parents along with her little sister, Nason; marooned in America; abused by the men who trafficked them...the only thing that kept Livia alive as a teenager was her determination to find Nason. Livia has never stopped looking. And she copes with her failure to protect her sister by doing everything she can to put predators in prison. Or, when that fails, by putting them in the ground.
Adrian McKinty was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford before moving to America in the early 1990s. Living first in Harlem, he found employment as a construction worker, barman, and bookstore clerk. In 2000 he moved to Denver to become a high school English teacher and it was there that he began writing fiction.
Introducing Wyoming's Sheriff Walt Longmire in this riveting novel from the New York Times best-selling author of Dry Bones, the first in the Longmire series, the basis for the hit Netflix original series Longmire. Johnson draws on his deep attachment to the American West to produce a literary mystery of stunning authenticity, full of memorable characters.
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. Decidedly better than that of Renko, whose lover, Eva, has left him for Detective Nikolai Isakov, a charismatic veteran of the civil war in Chechnya, a hero of the far right and, Renko suspects, a killer for hire. The cases entwine, and Renko's quests become a personal inquiry fueled by jealousy.
The investigation leads to the fields of Tver, outside of Moscow, where once a million soldiers fought. There, amidst the detritus, Renko must confront the ghost of his own father, a favorite general of Stalin's. In these barren fields, patriots and shady entrepreneurs - the Red Diggers and Black Diggers - collect the bones, weapons, and personal effects of slain World War II soldiers, and find that even among the dead there are surprises.
The story line takes place in Moscow and Tver, a Russsian city where the battle of Moscow took place. There a series of seemingly unrelated events that occur, and in the end Cruz Smith, like a Russian egg, fits them all together magically and seamlessly.
First there are sightings of Stalin at an old Subway station. Renko is asked to investigate.
Then a black beret-Kuznitsky is found with a meat cleaver in his neck by his wife who is inebriated. The investigators are Itzakoff and Oordman former Black Berets, in Chechnia.
Then there is Eva, a doctor shared as a lover by Renko and Oordman. Then there is the killing of a pizza delivery man by a Black Beret with the story of a terrorist battle in Chechnia brought out at the trial. There is a thread about Jenia an abandoned boy of 11, who is a chess genius and to whom Renko becomes a guardian. There is an old chess master who remains a staunch communist. There is a Russian and American film crew in Moscow and Tver. who manage Itzakoff's campaign for the Senate on the rogue National Patriots Party ticket(the party of Stalin's ghost).. There is Ginsburg a hunchback investigative reporter who takes pictures of the battle in Chechnia. A good part of this book is spent with the battlefield diggers of Tver. and it is here that everything gets resolved.
Along the way Renko gets garroted by a beautiful Russian harpist, shot in the head point blank by Jenia's father, hit in the head with a shovel and knifed. That he survives these catastrophic events and keeps on coming is the weakness (? strength) of this book. To give more information- and there is much more- would spoil it for virgin listeners.
The strength s of this book is the sparse but effective language, the irony, and most of all the humor. At times things are so absurd that I burst out laughing. The reader, Henry Stozier is excellent. This book is also a lesson in recent and World War II Russian history.
In the end it all hangs together
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
As a longtime Arcady Renko fan, I was expecting to like this book, but just how great it was took me by surprise. All the books have been great, starting way back with Gorky Park, but this was perhaps the richest, most intricate, most haunting and most soul-satisfying of all of them.
What did you like best about this story?
Renko's economy of words and understatement of even his thoughts brings us readers into the irony of his world and the perversity of the situations in which he seems to find himself.
What does Henry Strozier bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
The reader is wonderful, creating the characters, especially the old men, of the novel. But he is at his best expressing Arkady's thoughts and his spare, restrained manner of conversation. This book has a perfect match of narrator and character.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
In all the Renko novels there is a wealth of detail, coupled with the bringing together of these details to complete the picture as the story comes to a conclusion. Stalin's Ghost is no exception. Even the details of dreams and hallucinations are woven into the plot. The end of the book was like seeing the seemingly disparate pieces of an abstract puzzle satisfyingly assemble into a clear picture.
Any additional comments?
The story is haunting, gritty, ugly, beautiful, and utterly engrossing! It is not just a good story, but good writing at its best. The best thing I have put into my ears for quite a while.....
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Nice plot with good suspense, great background description. The only problem is in a character that despite being very smart survives by pure dumb luck, too many times. I will have a hard time getting another one of these books.
As if Chernobyl wasn't enough, post-disaster Renko is living with many different forms of fallout, and is perhaps imbued with powers extraordinary enough to qualify as a superhero. Nothing good can come of anything, yet he perseveres. If my friends in Russia in fact lived such desperate lives they could hardly be such good people . . . and Smith seems to miss some fundamental truths of the Russian bride industry . . . but the prose remains strong, the imagery specific, the tension real. By and large the narrator covers this well, but a few of his adopted voices are so ear-grating it's worth fast-forwarding past them and inferring the missed exposition rather than listening . . .
Wonderful as always. I recommend this book and the entire series highly. Give it a try.
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
I have read other Martin Cruz Smith books, and find them very entertaining. This one seemed like another good story, but I didn't feel like it worked well in an Audiobook format. I suggest that you listen to the sample before purchasing. Maybe it is just me . . .
The story line takes place in Moscow and Tver, a Russsian city where the battle of Moscow took place. There a series of seemingly unrelated events that occur, and in the end Cruz Smith, like a Russian egg, fits them all together magically and seamlessly.
First there are sightings of Stalin at an old Subway station. Renko is asked to investigate.
Then a black beret-Kuznitsky is found with a meat cleaver in his neck by his wife who is inebriated. The investigators are Itzakoff and Oordman former Black Berets, in Chechnia.
Then there is Eva, a doctor shared as a lover by Renko and Oordman. Then there is the killing of a pizza delivery man by a Black Beret with the story of a terrorist battle in Chechnia brought out at the trial. There is a thread about Jenia an abandoned boy of 11, who is a chess genius and to whom Renko becomes a guardian. There is an old chess master who remains a staunch communist. There is a Russian and American film crew in Moscow and Tver. who manage Itzakoff's campaign for the Senate on the rogue National Patriots Party ticket(the party of Stalin's ghost).. There is Ginsburg a hunchback investigative reporter who takes pictures of the battle in Chechnia. A good part of this book is spent with the battlefield diggers of Tver. and it is here that everything gets resolved.
Along the way Renko gets garroted by a beautiful Russian harpist, shot in the head point blank by Jenia's father, hit in the head with a shovel and knifed. That he survives these catastrophic events and keeps on coming is the weakness (? strength) of this book. To give more information- and there is much more- would spoil it for virgin listeners.
The strength s of this book is the sparse but effective language, the irony, and most of all the humor. At times things are so absurd that I burst out laughing. The reader, Henry Stozier is excellent. This book is also a lesson in recent and World War II Russian history.
In the end it all hangs together
1 of 2 people found this review helpful
I was really looking forward to this as Gorky Park was one of my favorite movies while in college. The story has an interesting premise but it seems like it could be so much more. Perhaps I have been spoiled by much longer and developed books like those by Nelson DeMille, for example. I think Cruz Smith is a good writer, but this story is just not fully developed. (The narration was very good).
I've always enjoyed Martin Cruz Smith's novels, and this one has not disappointed me. Good, listenable dialog and many interesting facts about the Russian culture and the aftermath of the USSR's involvement in Afganistan and WWII wrapped up in a solid engrossing plot line. Read very well, too.
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I recommend this book not only for its riveting story but also because it gives some insight into life in contemporary Russia. You are given an idea of what social elements give the most meaning to the people that live there, as well as a view of the conflict of feelings between old ideals and the new social order.
What other book might you compare Stalin's Ghost to and why?
I'm not sure I can compare this to any other book that I have read though if you have seen and enjoyed the British series "Archangel", you will probably enjoy this book.
Which character – as performed by Henry Strozier – was your favorite?
All the characters are well written and performed, but like other detective novels, the main detective Arcady is the main focus. His young homeless friend Genya is also an interesting and well portrayed character.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
No