The Siberian Dilemma

This ninth novel in Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series takes place mostly in Siberia where Arkady is sent to prosecute a Chechen charged with trying to assassinate Arkady's boss, Prosecutor Zurin. While he is there Arkady also tries to find his missing sometime lover, journalist Tatiana Petrovna. She had gone to Siberia several weeks before to interview oil rich oligarch Mikhail Kuznetsov, a presidential candidate hoping to oust Putin, making himself a target for the Kremlin to remove one way or another. Tatiana had left Arkady a message to indicate she'd be back three weeks ago but she wasn't on the train when he went to meet her and hadn't been in contact.

The first half of the novel mainly sets the scene for the action that culminates towards the end of the novel. There is political intrigue, allegations of sabotage, a sharpshooter firing at Arkady and a man wrongly framed for attempted murder. in his search for Tatiana Arkady meets Mikhail Kuznetsov, the presidential candidate who wants to make wide sweeping changes in Russia. Arkady also keeps coming across Boris Benz, another oil wealthy oligarch he met briefly in Moscow, and when Benz invites him on a bear hunt on the frozen Lake Baikal he accepts. The landscape around the lake is breath taking and bleakly beautiful but the isolation becomes dangerous when the bear hunt goes badly and Arkady and his companions must use all their survival skills to survive long enough to be found. The 'Siberian dilemma' is described as the decision you have to make after falling through the ice of a frozen lake to either try to climb out and freeze to death within a few seconds or not climb out and die of hypothermia within five minutes. In other words, is it better to sit back accept the inevitable or to try to do something about it, even if failure is almost certain. Arkady will have his own Siberian dilemma to face before the novel is finished.

Despite all the pressures on him and particularly Prosecutor Zurin's dislike of him, Cruz Smith has managed to keep Arkady Renko as an essentially just and honest man willing to fight for the underdog in a corrupt society. Set as it is in contemporary Russia, Cruz Smith also deals insightfully with many of the issues facing Russian society today including the way in which the environmental destruction caused by oil and gas exploration is ignored, and the way in which wealth from those natural resources leads to corruption and injustice as well as the control that the Kremlin has over political opponents and all facets of the everyday life of its people. Highly recommended for lovers of political thrillers.