Welcome to our Book Club!
Book Club meetings are held via Zoom beginning at 7:00 p.m. Portland time on the last Thursday evening of even-numbered months (with occasional exceptions due to holidays). Our current selection is Hotel Ukraine, the last in a series of Russia-centric historical fiction thrillers from award-winning American author Martin Cruz Smith, who passed away just after the novel was published last July. Join us for a discussion of Hotel Ukraine on Thursday, January 29th, 2026. (Scroll down for links to “Discussion Questions” and to the January 29th Zoom meeting.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Cruz Smith’s given name at birth, in 1942, was Martin William Smith—the change to “Cruz” taking place in 1977 in acknowledgement of his Native American heritage (“Cruz” being his maternal grandmother’s Pueblo name). Raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, by a cosmopolitan husband-wife jazz duo—the father a jazz musician, the mother a jazz nightclub singer (in addition to being a Pueblo Indian rights leader)—young Martin was exposed to a diversity of peoples, places, and cultures, about which he loved writing in his journal. Attending college at the University of Pennsylvania, he graduated in 1964 with a BA degree in creative writing and soon after landed a job as a sports journalist for the Associated Press in Pennsylvania. Uninspired by the work, he quit a year later and moved to New York City in 1966, working as an editor for a men’s magazine (“For Men Only”). But Smith got fired a few years later for publishing his own material in the magazine under various pseudonyms. Amid the occupational turmoil, in 1968 he met and got married to the love of his life—NYC chef Emily Arnold (his beloved “Em” to whom a number of his novels, including Hotel Ukraine, are specially dedicated). Pursuing his ambition to become a novelist, Smith approached publisher G.P. Putnam in 1972 to pitch the idea of a mystery story starring a dutiful, though anti-establishment, Soviet homicide detective as the protagonist, but Putnam rejected the proposal, contending that a Russian hero would not go down well with U.S. readers. Undeterred, Smith saved up money and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1973, spending a week absorbing the culture and political landscape, making contacts, then returning to begin work on Gorky Park. Several years went by before publisher Random House stepped up to pay Smith’s asking price of $1,000,000 for a 100,000 copy first printing, and he was catapulted to fame and fortune via the novel and subsequent movie. (Prior to Gorky Park, Smith kept afloat financially via his 1977 best-seller Nightwing, set on a Hopi Indian reservation.) Over a span of four decades, Martin Cruz Smith wrote 16 novels, 11 of which featured the indefatigable ace Moscow detective Arkady Renko, with spot-on insights into Russian history, culture, and politics. Amazingly, Smith battled Parkinson’s disease the last 30 years of his career.
ABOUT THE NOVEL
Divided into 39 short chapters (273 pages), Hotel Ukraine opens shortly after Putin’s “Special Military Operation” (i.e., invasion) into Ukraine and is the sequel to Smith’s previous Renko novel, Independence Square, which takes place at the time of Putin’s military takeover and subsequent annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. In Independence Square, Renko is diagnosed with early Parkinson’s (mirroring Smith’s own diagnosis in the early 1990s), and Hotel Ukraine picks up the story several years later with Arkady trying to keep the advancing disease a secret from his corrupt, Putin-compliant boss for fear of being forced into retirement from the job he’s done so well for so long as Chief Investigator. At controversy is Renko’s investigation into the brutal death of a high-ranking government official that leads to evidence starkly at odds with Putin’s wartime propaganda, spelling danger for Arkady, family, & friends. The novel is also a love story between father & son as well as between devoted soul mates. In this, his farewell to life, Martin Cruz Smith makes the case against a ruthless Putin. See if you agree. Enjoy the read!
Click on the meeting date below to join!