Gorky Park (Volume 1): Martin Cruz Smith (The Arkady Renko Novels)

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The plot is pretty complicated, as you'd expect, but the trappings (you'll see what I did there in a second) are pretty fun. During the trip Arkady realizes that, to avoid a diplomatic incident, the FBI agents plan to let Osborne kill him and Irina before allowing KGB agents, who are tailing them, to kill Osborne.

Even before the finding of the Gorky Park corpses, Renko has been having plenty of troubles of his own. The novel was praised for the authenticity with which it depicted life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. R. was home to a brilliant real-life scientist, an archaeologist and anthropologist named Mikhail M. Martin Cruz Smith didn’t just give us a procedural of how Soviet cops worked, he also provided a view of an entire country living under a system where covering your own ass had become an art form and logic rarely entered in to it.I've been wanting to read this book for a very long time so it was disappointing t0 find that it wasn't quite as enjoyable as I'd hoped. When Gorky Park was first published in 1981, it was immediately banned in the then Soviet Union because of its apt depiction of everyday Soviet life. 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.

The vodka-fueled bludgeonings he usually investigates are easy to handle, but these three frozen corpses in Gorky Park—two men and one woman shot to death, their faces and fingertips removed to prevent identification—are another matter entirely. But this is a fully realized world, a backdrop that adds a great deal of freshness to yet another twisty detective thriller. The tail-end gets a bit droopy -- Renko loses his shit and goes into a pity spiral, and there's all this mirroring of the ways the U. 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. A wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain, Gorky Park is a tense, atmospheric, and memorable crime story.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. Gorky Park'' depicts a society where it is important to own a washing machine even if it doesn't work, so that your neighbors know you possess such a wonderful thing. By PETER ANDREWS; Peter Andrews, a contributing editor to Saturday Review, frequently reviews adventure novels. His life and work are always placed in the shadow of his father, a notoriously bloodthirsty World War II general who despises his son as “weak. Renko's love interest, Irina, was likewise revealed to have been institutionalized for similarly false "psychiatric problems" and forcibly treated at some earlier time, resulting in a tumor that left her with a severe facial blemish and blind in one eye.