Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith

Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Summary: Polar Star picks up with Arkady Renko after we leave him in Gorky Park. He has been banned from the Party and is now forced to bounce from job to job in Siberia. His current position is on the slime line of the Polar Star's fish processing line in the Baltic Sea - a far cry from the inspector position he held in Moscow. But Russian politics won't leave Renko alone even here, far from Russian soil and in American waters, when a female galley worker is pulled dead from the sea in one of the American fishing nets. Arkady Renko is pulled back into the world of investigation but this time there is no place to hide.

This is the second book in the Arkady Renko series and I have to say I found it a bit slow. As mentioned above, the whole book takes place on a Soviet Factory ship in the Bearing Sea, where American ships bring their fish to be processed rather than returning to a factory on American soil. However, there are only so many people on said ship and Renko pursues this murder with an almost bulldoggish determination that at 384 pages becomes almost tedious. Smith does have one advantage that I admire over other mystery writers is I am truely left guessing until the end "who done it".

It's also been several years since I read Gorky Park and I have to admit I was a bit foggy on some of the details that linked the two books together. So I was left to piece together past bits with current bits and that distracts me from the main story.

I wasn't so turned off that I won't look into the next book. Overall I am enjoying the series and I'll probably try and pick up a used copy next time I'm at my favorite used bookstore

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