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? As in many a modern procedural, the detective brings his own baggage to the case and gets personally involved, especially with a sexy suspect. Arkady, observing American clerks using telephones in NY: "The clerks would pick up a phone, say no more than a word or two and set it down. What sets this suspenseful 1981 novel apart is Martin Cruz Smith's meticulous portrayal, in vivid and stunning detail, of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union prior to perestroika and the Soviet Union's dissolution. But, you know - reading it in the eighties, I was concurrently witnessing colossal transformations in the same office which was the milieu for my reading - strikingly similar to changes occurring now.

In explaining how he came up with smuggled icons for the motivation to murder, Arkady says that it's about Marxist dialectic: "We are now in an intermediate stage of communism where there are still criminal tendencies resulting from relics of capitalism in the minds of some individuals. In spite of his weakened state, Arkady laughs when he realizes from his interrogators' questions that Iamskoy was himself a high-ranking KGB officer, planted as a spy in the militsiya, and his superiors were badly embarrassed to find that he betrayed them to help Osborne. Chief Inspector Arkady Renko is tasked with solving the murders of three people found in Gorky Park, their bodies frozen and killed weeks earlier, hidden by the snow. A wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain, Gorky Park is a tense, atmospheric, and memorable crime story.In Smith’s Gorky Park, the scientist is one Professor Andreev from the University of Moscow; and while the professor normally (and wisely) stays away from anything that could be considered political, he is intrigued enough in this instance to take on the professional challenge of reconstructing the faces of the Gorky Park victims.

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. What protects Renko is his excellent work as an investigator, his known loyalty to Russia (though not the Soviet Union), his ability to think on his feet, a Stoic approach to life, and an ironic sense of humour. and the discovery of three bodies in Gorky Park is just the start of a conspiracy that will take Renko all the way to New York. Irina Asanova, a beautiful young Siberian dissident, also seems to have connections to the victims; and from the disdain with which Renko and Irina speak to each other, it is clear that the two are falling deeply in love.As he reluctantly begins to investigate the murders and discovers that one of the bodies was an American, Renko wants nothing more than to dump the case on the KGB since he’s pretty sure they killed those people anyhow. My favorite part of this novel was Cruz Smith's ability to portray the Russian psyche, and there is nothing that does this better than humor and insinuations (that may be lost on those who are not familiar with the Eastern Block machinery-and Cruz Smith, bless his soul, is not explicit-explicating to a "western" audience the intangibles of life beyond the Iron Curtain would only destroy the novel's realism). It begins with three bodies in the park and Arkady Renko, our main character, and senior homicide investigator, sent to the crime scene. From other reviews that I have read I know that I'm clearly in the minority but I just didn't find anything about this book or the characters to like. If you like crime novels that have a set of well defined characters, atmospheric settings and a rather complex plot then I believe you will enjoy this novel.

When Chief Inspector Arkady Renko discovers three mutilated in Gorky Park, he wants to do everything he can to prove that the case is more suitable for KGB than the militia.officer attached to the Red Army during the Nazi invasion, tasked with interrogating three captured S. In fact, in a section near the end of Gorky Park, Renko does follow the case to a corrupt United States, and engages in deadly intrigue with the FBI who it turn out are in league (for reasons that elude me) with the KGB. Meanwhile, Renko falls in love with a beautiful, headstrong dissident for whom he may risk everything . In describing trying to process a body, there are pages about "the right forms": "Nobody would touch the body without the right forms.

Other times though it seemed to drag and I just wanted it to end so I could move on to the next book.When a key witness and a colleague are gunned down Arkady tries to save Irina from the same fate, only to learn that he is being framed for a murder of a friend. It begins with a triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in Smith’s background that would point ahead toward his writing a series of detective novels set in the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. In fact, Cruz Smith manages to draw parallels between the two as equally corrupt, and oppressive - in their own ways.