I'm going to miss these guys

Martin Cruz Smith died last month, but I didn’t really mark his passing until last week. That’s when I finished his last book, “Hotel Ukraine.” Smith was a great story teller, and his character Arkady Renko is the most memorable of the hundreds of fictional detectives I have known. I’ll miss them both.

“Hotel Ukraine” is set immediately before and after Putin’s invasion of the country in 2022. Like nearly all of the 11 Renko novels, this one has him investigating an individual murder amid the vast corruption of the modern Russian state. This time it’s a diplomat, beaten to death in the titular hotel in Kyiv. As we all know by now, when high-profile figures die anywhere near Putin, there’s not a lot of pressure from the top to crack the case. Far from it.

If the plot feels sort of familiar, the story is well-told and timely. We get a glimpse of the Bucha massacre and a fascist paramilitary that closely resembles the Wagner group. (You’ll recall that Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane explosion – not long after threatening a mutiny against Putin.)

I don’t know if I’d call “Hotel Ukraine” Smith’s best work, but it’s his last and deserves an extra accolade because of that. If, like me, you’ve been a Renko fan since “Gorky Park” in 1981, you won’t be disappointed.

If you don’t know Renko, well, I kind of envy you. I’d love to read all these novels again for the first time.