Martin Cruz Smith – Polar Star

Ballantine Books, copyright 1989, 366 pages

ISBN: 0-345-36765-0

Read January 2012, at age 33

This book is apparently a sequel to Gorky Park, which I haven’t read.  I didn’t feel like I was missing much, but I’d suggest starting there instead, anyway.  Maybe it would make the main character a bit more sympathetic.

From the back cover:

He has made too many enemies.  He has lost his party membership.  Once Moscow’s top criminal investigator, he now toils in obscurity on a Russian factory ship working with American trawlers in the middle of the Bering Sea.  But when an adventurous female crew member is picked up dead with the day’s catch, Arkady Renko is ordered by his captain to investigate an “accident” that has all the marks of murder.

Up against the celebrated Soviet Bureaucracy once more, Renko must again become the obsessed, dedicated cop he was in Gorky Park and solve a chilling mystery with international complications, in this vivid, heart-pounding thriller that never lets up.

Reactions after the break.  Some spoilers, too.

One good thing:

The setting was very well described – it very clearly conveyed the depressive, oppressive atmosphere on board the Polar Star.

One bad thing:

I never cared about any of the characters.

Overall:

I’m not really sure why I read this book.  It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for a really long time, and I don’t know when, where, or why I picked it up.  It’s a bit outside my usual fare, which is a good thing, but I didn't like it much at all, which is less good.  The setting was depressing.  The international espionage felt like a joke, and the murder mystery was solved by the main character knowing more than the reader, and spilling it in info dumps along the way.  It was supposed to be a thriller, but everything had a feeling of inevitability about it, rather than tension.

Rating: 2

Setting:

The book was set on a fish-processing ship stationed in the Bering Sea.  It was old, broken-down, and the work was miserable and brainless.  It was well-described and all, but I got tired of reading about it.

Characters:

I really don’t have much of a feel for who any of the characters were, except maybe our murder victim.  She was the most interesting of the bunch, and she spends the whole book dead.  The rest of them… they pretty much are their jobs.  Probably they hate their jobs.  Maybe the love them.  Maybe they have a hobby.  I didn't understand their motivations and they weren't sympathetic in the least. 

Plot: 

There were three elements to the plot:  a murder mystery, during the investigation of which our hero discovers that first the Russians, and then the Americans, are using the joint commercial venture as a cover for espionage and/or counter-espionage operations.  There was also a completely irrelevant romantic subplot that culminated in angry drunk sex on the part of both participants.  I didn't actually like any of the plotlines, but the murder-mystery was less bad than the rest.  It was good to pick through all the stuff and find out who the dead girl was, and why she became that way.  The execution was lacking, though – Renko goes poking his nose everywhere, sees a few things, of which he passes a few observations on to the reader at the time, and then a bit later spills everything to somebody in a meeting or something.  Of course, he gets beat up and threatened along the way, but I couldn't bring myself to care.  He didn't seem to care, either.  It was odd. 

Readability:

The language was well chosen for terseness, a sense of oppressiveness, and a sense of depression.  That made it a slow, plodding, somewhat tedious read.

Other opinions:

Welsh Rogue

Not particularly detailed, but a completely different take on the book than mine.

SciFi with a Dash of Paprika

Kinda in the middle there.  She figured it was slow, but not so slow to give up on the series.