It is the destiny of Arkady Renko to suffer. When we last saw him in Wolves Eat Dogs, he had a girlfriend Eva and a foster son Zhenya. Now both Eva and Zhenya have drifted in different directions out of his life, and he's on the verge of losing them. As usual, the prosecutor for whom he works hates him more than any other senior investigator. The Moscow snow is about to melt, which means bodies will be found in spring.

Stalin's Ghost opens at 2am in a café with Renko and his police colleague Victor talking to a trashy young woman who wants her husband killed. Apparently she thought she could pay a detective named Isakov to carry out the assassination. Victor got her phone call by mistake, and he and Renko play along with her, hoping to gather enough evidence to implicate Isakov.

Renko has reason to hate Isakov who is having an affair with his girlfriend Eva. Eva has grown dissatisfied with Renko's workaholic habits, and never comes home anymore. Eva and Isakov knew each other a few years back in Chechnya where she worked as a doctor and Isakov served with the Black Berets. Now Eva has renewed her affair with Isakov. If that weren't bad enough, Arkady's foster son Zhenya is now twelve years old and practically a street kid, disappearing for weeks at a time and only showing up to play in chess competitions for money.

Renko and Victor, working on their own time, don't quite have enough evidence to bust Isakov. Then the prosecutor calls Renko to investigate an unrelated matter: the latest sighting on the Metro of Stalin's ghost. Renko must go interview Metro passengers: everyone from college kids who think the apparition might be someone they learned about in history class to oldsters who calmly report that Comrade Stalin waved to them from the station platform.

Of course this is a ludicrous assignment. But Stalin is still a sensitive matter to the Russian people. As Renko explains on page 44, if the prosecutor calls the Stalin sightings a hoax, he will have "superpatriots to deal with. Do nothing and let rumors spread and he'll have a shrine on his hands … embrace the situation, announce that the sightings are genuine visions and [he will] be left high and dry as a raving lunatic if no more sightings occur."

So Renko is given a "Stalin expert" to help him: Platonov, a cranky old Communist and former chess grandmaster who also happens to know Zhenya. But Renko has no time to think about Zhenya because he notices that Isakov was the responding detective at the last Stalin sighting.

Then he follows up on a crime scene in which Isakov improbably claims that a drunk woman killed her equally drunk husband with a perfect blow to his spine with a meat cleaver. Renko starts to connect the dots on all the complicated events in which Isakov has recently been involved: from the young woman who wanted her husband killed to the Stalin sightings to the drunk woman who supposedly murdered her husband.

It looks like a conspiracy. Isakov is running for political office, and the Stalin sightings are a hoax to stir up patriotic feelings: vote for Isakov to restore the glory of Russia. Isakov, of course, is a war hero. Or is he? Renko digs into Isakov's military records, and wonders why all these dead men at various crime scenes are from the same village of Tver outside Moscow. Not only that, they all served with Isakov in the Chechen war. Could Isakov be murdering them to cover something up?

The investigation will almost cost Renko his life. It will drag him, Eva, and Zhenya to mysterious Tver where secrets await from the Second World War.

Stalin's Ghost is an absorbing, if complicated, mystery. It is the sixth book in the Arkady Renko series, and can be read as a stand-alone though it's better to read Wolves Eat Dogs first so you'll be familiar with Eva and Zhenya. Stalin's Ghost is available on Amazon through this link: Stalin's Ghost: An Arkady Renko Novel