Polar Star

Plot

Fishing in the Bering Sea, a trawler's net bring up flatfish, pollock, crabs and a blonde girl in a white blouse and blue jeans. Her name is Zina, and she is a crewmember of the Soviet Factory ship Polar Star which processes the American trawlers' catches. Detailed to the ship's "slime line," where the catch is gutted before freezing, is second-class seaman Arkady Renko, formerly Senior Investigator in the Moscow Prosecutor's Office, now banished to obscurity for "political unreliability." Renko, however, is appointed by the Polar Star's captain to investigate the death. While other officers hijack the inquiry and bring in a neat verdict of suicide, Renko pursues his lonely search and discovers, among other thngs, why so many crewmen in the fishing fleet have an urgent interest in turning him, too, into a corpse. And as the fleet clears the Aleutians and fishes its way north till it is locked in the polar ice and fog, the opportunities are not lacking. -- Publisher's description.