Though technically he has been suspended from the prosecutor's office for turning up unpleasant truths, Arkady Renko strives to solve one last case: the death of a young woman whose body is found on the perimeter of Moscow's main train hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose, but an examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia's premier luxury fair. Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect. In "Three Stations," Smith produces a complex and haunting vision of an emergent Russia's secret underclass of street urchins, greedy thugs, and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and fear.