There was so much reliance on the political and inter-country relationships at the crux of the story that I think it would leave anyone who wasn’t living in 1981 Russia feeling a little lost. Martin Cruz Smith has produced an intense yet finely-balanced murder mystery, one that keeps a reader guessing and on his toes. The author demonstrated talent in describing scenes in the story whether it is in Moscow, a Russian dacha, or a dingy New York hotel room you could visualize it and feel as though you were right there. Arkady says he will do so only if Major Pribluda of the KGB hands over all of the taped conversations of foreigners for January and February that year.

A mesmerizing police procedural / murder mystery that also explores Soviet Russia and the dichotomy between east and west. It’s set in the 1980s in Russia, which was a very, very different time wrought with political nitty-gritties that most people aren’t completely aware of. R. to purchase Barguzin sables for the fur trade, since the Soviet Union has a monopoly on those sables.The killer is right about the endemic corruption of the Soviet Union, as an act of betrayal by a long-time friend and mentor very nearly costs Renko his life, and drops him into the clutches of the KGB into the bargain. It's pretty self-explanatory: because these books are not taking place in our universe, it's up to the author to give us all the details -- to paint the picture, provide shading in just the right places, ensure we can tell what we are supposed to be looking at. Amongst his findings the pathologist Lyudin states that one of the men had a form of root canal treatment not available in the USSR, suggesting he was a foreigner, and that the case should be handed over to the KGB.

He is a cop, whose job is to clean up the bloodstains left by his fellow citizens in moments of rage and madness. This can be done well, emphasizing just here and embellishing just there, so the empty spaces also fill in the canvas. Foe the reader who like an adult thriller in a world from darker times, but you'll find yourself wondering what has changed from the Soviet Union towards Putins' Russia.One of the wonders of ''Gorky Park'' is how easily we recognize Renko, the honest Communist policeman. R. was home to a brilliant real-life scientist, an archaeologist and anthropologist named Mikhail M. And the hunt for the killer begins… It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing.

Interrogation is largely a process of rebirth done in the clumsiest fashion possible, a system in which the midwife attempts to deliver the same baby a dozen times in a dozen different ways. What makes this murder different is that the killer sliced off the faces and fingertips of all three victims – a gruesome extra touch that might make it seem, at first, as though the identities of the murder victims could never be discovered. In Gorky Park he has given us an excellent mystery that—although no indictment of humanity--is also a memorable portrait of the Soviet Union in decline.Gorky Park introduces Arkady Renko, Chief Investigator with the Moscow militia, set during the former Soviet Union under Secretary Brezhnev. The last few chapters were a rollercoaster as the action decamps to the USA and I think I held my breath for the entirety of the penultimate chapter. Granted, I have no idea what life was like in the Soviet Union in the early '80s, and maybe the author didn't either. Thanks to his charm and fluent German, Osborne got the information he needed from the officers over a friendly picnic in the countryside, then shot all three of them dead - almost exactly the manner in which the three bodies in Gorky Park were killed. He starts his local investigation in hopes of showing foreign interests are involved, which would allow him to turn it over to the KGB.

His friends and colleagues have troubles of their own, especially as one of his officers is a KGB informant.

Why would a government put Stalin, who was Georgian, and Khrushchev, who was Ukrainian, in power if the policies were so racist against non-Russians? Not always an easy read, this book always shows rather than tells, and requires some extra effort by the reader sometimes (in a good way); seems like a good warm-up for the John le Carre buddy read I’m doing in a few days. Smith also had excellent timing when he created Renko because through the next several decades he could use his detective to give us mysteries that are also glimpses of what it’s been like for Russians through the fall of the Soviet Union and the aftermath today. Born in Pennsylvania, Smith is not of Russian or Eastern European heritage; rather, his mother is of Pueblo ancestry and was active in Indigenous Rights movements.