HAVANA BAY by Martin Cruz Smith: a Russian Prosecutor's Investigator in Cuba

Martin Cruz Smith is a new author for me, and I didn't realize that HAVANA BAY is part of a series of books about a Russian prosecutor's investigator, Renko Arkady. The series begins with the book GORKY PARK and, as I understand, all the books in the series are in Russia (or the Soviet Union) except HAVANA BAY.

Arkady has come to Cuba because his friend has gone missing there. When Arkady arrives, he is shown an unrecognizable body that was found drifting in an inner tube  in Havana Bay. The authorities in Cuba have determined that this is Arkady's missing friend.

But Arkady is surprised that the Cuban authorities did no investigation to be sure of the body's identity or what he died of. And that night someone tries to kill him, so he decides to do some investigating himself.

The story gets more and more involved from there in the week before Arkady can catch a plane back to Russia.

This book didn't grab me (which I think a book should do) until around page 200 (which was about 2/3 of the way through). But it probably would have interested me more if I had read the preceding books in this series before I read HAVANA BAY.  I would have already understood and sympathized with Arkady.

Ordinarily, I give up on a book that doesn't grab me before I get to page 150, but HAVANA BAY (and I assume the other books in this series) has such great dialog and sarcasm that I kept going because I enjoyed that. Smith has some great cracks throughout the book about life in a communist society. I expect these are even better in his other books, when Arkady, as a Russian investigator, is living in Russia and critical of the system there.