My review of Martin Cruz Smith’s
The Girl From Venice appeared in the Washington Times.
Martin Cruz Smith is perhaps
best known for his crime thriller series featuring Arkady Renko, a Russian
militia investigator whose decency often made him run afoul of his Soviet
masters.
Mr. Smith has also written
“December 6,” a thriller about Imperial Japan on the eve of World War II.
“People ask why I took on the
subject of an enemy like Japan on the brink of the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I
was interested in knowing what was going through the minds of the Japanese at
this turning point in our history. I wondered why on earth the Japanese started
a war they had so little chance of winning. To me it was an act of
desperation,” Mr. Smith explains on his website. “As a writer, I’m drawn to imagining
the other side. In ‘Gorky Park,’ it was figuring out where Russians were coming
from; in ‘Havana Bay,’ it was telling a Cuban story from the perspective of
Cubans. You don’t sympathize, you empathize, which is a harder task.”
In “The Girl From Venice” Mr.
Smith returns to World War II and this time he imagines the other side from
Fascist Italy.
You can read the rest of the
review via the below link:
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