After readying Gorky Park, I couldn’t wait to read the next in the Arkady Renko series, Polar Star.

Arkady Renko had made many enemies. He had been the top investigator in Moscow, but now, his party membership removed, he was forced to work in Siberia, where so many others had perished.

He was detailed to toil on a Soviet factory ship which fished the deathly cold waters between Siberia and Alaska, the Bering Sea.

No longer the great criminal man, but now a second-class seaman with a dark past.

Following an enigmatic death of a crew member, the captain gives Renko the chance of a kind of redemption. The woman’s dead body had been hauled in among the fish taken up by the net. The matter is puzzling but has the feel of murder rather than misadventure.

Renko faces desperate odds and an almost unsolvable crime with implications which go beyond the borders of Mother Russia.

Polar Star is another superb novel by author Martin Cruz Smith.

‘Impossible to put down . . . a book of heart-stopping suspense and intricate plotting, but also a meticulously researched, ambitious literary work of great distinction.’   The Detroit News

‘Polar Star is not merely the work of our best writer of suspense, but one of our best writers, period’    New York Times

‘Splendid … . the reader will be kept guessing to the end’ Evening Standard

‘Stunning.’   The New York Times Book Review

‘Martin Cruz Smith writes the most inventive thrillers of anyone in the first rank of thriller writers.’   The Washington Post Book World

‘Gripping . . . absorbing.’   The Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Cruz Smith’s ability is to tell both a thriller and a novel at once, without losing either strand. There are whispers of Conrad and Graham Greene in this novel’   Sydney Morning Herald