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. Arkady Renko, a chief homicide investigator, is assigned to a case involving three corpses found in Gorky Park, an amusement park in Moscow, who have had their faces and fingertips cut off. He is a cop, whose job is to clean up the bloodstains left by his fellow citizens in moments of rage and madness.

In 1979, John Le Carre completed the last volume of his highly esteemed “Karla Trilogy” ( Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People), in which he depicts in detail the culture of the British Spy Network. The "pop babies" propaganda did exist in USSR, but it wasn't to have Russians as the dominant race, it was because during WWII almost an entire generation got killed They needed to repopulate the country. Instead I began to feel I was reading a sneaky tongue-in-cheek joke mystery or an overcooked Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon!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. 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. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it. 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. 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?

Even though this has plenty of Soviet political intrigue and an international aspect to it this doesn’t feel like a spy story, and that’s mainly because of Arkady Renko. The detective's weakness is his love, of course, for a beautiful Soviet dissident who'll do nearly anything to get out of the USSR. Martin Cruz Smith's novels include Gorky Park , Stallion Gate , Nightwing , Polar Star , Stalin's Ghost , Rose , December 6 , Tatiana , The Girl from Venice , and The Siberian Dilemma . 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. And it still seems to entrance readers who find the concept of a murder investigation in a supposedly socialist country a novelty.run of domestic crime -a Muscovite brains his spouse with a vodka bottle and wanders off, leaving a trail of gore that Abbott and Costello could follow. Gorky Park – officially, the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure (Центральный парк культуры и отдыха имени Горького)– plays a role in Moscow life similar to that of Central Park in New York City.

The Guardian said that "the book's depiction of contemporary Soviet life was so alarmingly accurate, it was soon banned in the Soviet Union" and "became popular with dissident [Soviet] intellectuals. Osborne shoots two of the FBI agents as two KGB agents arrive, and the KGB and FBI agents are killed in the chaotic firefight that ensues.Meanwhile, while checking the crime scene again at night Arkady disturbs a man with an American accent who attacks him. Which matters not if he solves the case only he gradually finds out that he was never meant to solve the case because some Party members have other ideas.