What are these studying initiatives we set for ourselves? Acts of recompense? One started for me when an advance copy of Martin Cruz Smith’s 2023 novel Independence Sq. hit my desk at Vogue.
I felt a pang of one thing. My father had cherished spy tales and police procedurals set in far-flung, wintery places, and there had been at the least one worn hardback in my household’s home by Smith, a thick novel referred to as Gorky Park that had drawn my consideration as a boy (as all my dad’s books did). Gorky Park’s material—murders in Moscow, the Chilly Battle, the Soviet Union—have been interesting factors of reference for my father, a cash supervisor who learn thrillers at a gradual clip and listened to them, too. After the markets closed, he’d come residence from the workplace and generally linger in his automobile exterior our home, letting his audiobook run.
I valiantly learn a few of my dad’s John le Carré in my early teenage years, some Robert Ludlum, some Frederick Forsyth, some Tom Clancy. However his copy of Gorky Park, with its forbidding heft, stayed on the shelf.
In order that spring of 2023—my father lifeless some 12 years from most cancers—I whipped by way of Independence Sq. as if making up for misplaced time. The novel was a breeze, an investigation of a lacking anti-Putin activist set between up to date Moscow, Kyiv, and the Crimean peninsula, and it launched me to Arkady Renko, an investigator in a prosecutor’s workplace in Moscow. Renko has a querulous relationship to authority, and strikingly, in Independence Sq., he begins to stumble and stroll unsteadily. He’s identified with Parkinson’s illness.
One other pang: Parkinson’s is the situation my mom has lived with for 30 years. An unlikely convergence had shaped, non-public and galvanizing—my father and mom, lengthy divorced, by no means absolutely reconciled, introduced collectively within the pages of a Martin Cruz Smith thriller.
As I mentioned, studying initiatives are private, and this one had begun in earnest. Over the course of the subsequent 18 months, I might learn each Arkady Renko novel; there are 11. I accomplished this activity on a latest Sunday afternoon, devouring Resort Ukraine, the ultimate one, launched simply this month by Simon & Schuster. 5 days later, information broke that Smith had died.
