Havana Bay

Moscow detective Arkady Renko, out of work and miserable for the last half-dozen years, is called to the Russian Embassy in Havana to look into the mysterious disappearance of his old comrade Sergei Pribluda. Renko is fighting suicidal impulses, trying to survive despite a crushing personal tragedy, and the trip to Cuba is an opportunity to leave the gloomy and cold Moscow winter behind and get away from the constant reminders of better times. Unknown to his bosses he plans to commit suicide once he gets to Cuba. But immediately after he arrives the Cuban police want him to identify a floater pulled from Havana Bay as his missing friend. Pribluda, a former KGB agent, who is currently the Russian Security Service's resident spy in Havana, has been missing for almost two weeks. The Cuban authorities want him to make the identification, acknowledge that the death was from natural causes, and return to Moscow on the next flight.Renko says he's not sure it Pribluda, since the body is badly decomposed and the circumstances surrounding the death may not be as obvious as they seem. Renko wants the Cuban police to investigate, however they apparently won't. Renko regains his will to live and is determined to find out what happened to Pribluda, so he begins his own snooping. What he finds is more than he expected and certainly more than the Cubans wanted him to find. It seems the case has the potential to become an embarrassment for Castro's government and the Cuban's want the matter closed quickly and quietly. As he's done in Renko's past adventures, Smith shows his readers a culture and country foreign to most in the United States. He depicts a Cuba learning to make its own way in the world, an island with rich customs where 1950s vintage American cars cruise seaside boulevards and many people practice the mystic Santeria religion. I couldn't put this book down and I can't recommend it enough.

and feel the heat! Smith is fantastic with putting the reader smack dab in the shoes of his protagonist Arkady Renko. Luckily the details of Cuba are equalled by the plot. As the exotic location slowly reveals itself, so too does another brilliant landscape of charachters. Who else but Smith could untangle the complex personal and international relationships of post-cold war Cuba and Russia? The depth of Renko's charachter alone is such a refreshing alternative to the typical hero-stud we usually have to contend with. I would put all of Martin Cruz Smith's Renko novels (as well as Rose) in the intelligent thriller catageory. Reading them feels like a guilty pleasure, yet I also feel as though I have learned so much about the subject matter (Cuba, Russians, English mining, etc.) My only regret with Mr Smith's writing is that there is far too little of it.

Though "Havan Bay" takes place far from the cold and inhospitable climes braved by intrepid investigator Arkady Renko in Martin Cruz Smith's other Renko novels ("Gorky Park", "Polar Star" and "Red Square"), the famed and unloved Moscow detective finds himslef feeling right at home - which is to say that nobody wants him around. Ostensibly in Cuba to identify the body of Renko's one-time enemy and savior, KGB Col. Pribluda, Renko meets expatriate Russians, exiled American hippies and a host of Cubans who endure their island nation's gradual disintegration. The body Pribluda, who saved Renko's life after "Gorky Park", is barely recognizable, but nobody expects the visiting Moscow detective to challenge official Cuban story that the washed up, disintegrated body is Pribluda's, or that the old KGB officer's death was anything more than an accident. Renko, all but clinically depressed folowing the sudden death of his wife, is in no mood to make friends or follow official decisions on anything. Unlike previosu novels, Renko has no official responsibility to find the truth, or any ulterior motive to do so. Unlike the situation in "Polar Star", set aboard a floating fish factory in the Glasnost days before the collapse of the USSR, there is no hidden room where KGB officers control the situation. Nevertheless, Renko presses on. The clues don't fit together as neatly as they do in "Polar Star", and the portrait of a decayed Havana doesn't offer the reader as much as say the newly reunified Germany of "Red Square" (for that matter, it doesn't offer much to the Cubans either), but the plot never dips and Smith's prose never cease to surprise.

Havana Bay is an extremely engaging and exciting mystery novel that is a strong and welcome addition to the author's three previous Arkady Renko novels, each of them featuring the quiet and sensitive but also extraordinarily dedicated and perceptive Moscow detective, once again up against the power and evil of a corrupt political and social system that is doing its best to obscure the facts, cover the crime, and eliminate him from the scene. Cruz-Smith takes us into the heart of Castro's Havana and gives us a gritty, raw look at a world that runs by its own rules, and the overall view isn't a pretty one. This isn't the Havana that tourists or Castro apologists will see, but one with a dirty underbelly that for all its moralism reeks of corruption on a political and social level. As he did with Polar Star and Rose, Cruz-Smith takes us into the heart of a place and a time we would never have otherwise visited and makes us feel as though we're actually there - the rarest gift of a fine novelist. This is a book that will keep you enthralled and however much you'll want to reach the end of the mystery, its very richness of scene and detail will make you wish the book were twice or three times the size. Definitely one you won't want to miss.

What a story teller Martin Cruz Smith! I read mystery books reluctantly, only because friends recommend them repeatedly, but this is one I stayed up late reading. From the first page, questions dance along, dragging mysteries along in the answers. Who is the corpse found floating in a pneumatic tube in Havana Bay? (In a what? Why?) Is it Pribluda, Arkady's friend and former nemisis? (And if so, why doesn't Arkady identify the body?) Why was this person killed? Why is a police sargent trying to kill Arkady ? (Who is after all leaving on the first plane out... in a week) Where is the cell phone that will help explain why the translater tried to kill Arkady? The answers are woven into complex, focused and fascinating plot.Wonderful characters. I enjoyed the contrast of the affable menace of two aging former sixties radical ex-patriots and the violent police sargent who dogs the protagonists with physical attacks and threats. I guess I fell in love with Arkady, bundled in a black cashmere coat, the last gift of his recently deceased wife, hiding from the heat of Cuba, whether it emanates from tropical sun or the tough and sexy Cuban detective who in a touching scene ends up wearing...The culture and political issues in Cuba today pulse the story and provide many provocative undercurrents for the murder mystery. Santeria, is a dark empowering religion, its tenets a comfort not just to the bad and the bewildered, but to the heroic and the ordinary Cubans in the book. The liberal among us tend to see our country as economic colonizers, slipping our culture in the form of movies, music and television down the throats of those who need food, trade and promises of a better life. It certainly is a giggle to see Russia cast in the role of colonizer, as the characters in the book do in their contemptuous and funny comments.There is humor and emotional power in this murder mystery. The dregs of Cuba's heyday as a tourist destination, the feckless behavior of jinterias, - young prostitutes, all give the reader a subtle interesting mirror between the life draining depression of Arkady, brought about by the final straw of his wife's death and Cuba's resigned plodding to manage a life that can be made manageable, but never truly better. On the edge of desperation, some folks just become more and more resourceful, and there is not a line of dialogue or strand of story that does not bring the reader to admire what some folks do when the going gets tough. The ending is a surprise. It is a surprise in the usual sense - that the ending seems inevitable only after one reads it. It is also a surprise because the book is so engrossing, the reader could hardly hope for an unpredicted turn of events at the very end.Gorky Park, also written by Martin Cruz Smith, was one of the few other mystery books I've read, and it was the best, I thought, until I read Havana Bay. I think, next time, I will read one of his books witho