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. 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. The main detective is always sympathetic and manages to get the job done despite the restraints imposed by his system.

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. In the case of Gorky Park, the protagonist is Arkady Renko, a chief investigator for the militsiya, the regular Moscow police. Took turns and went directions that I never saw coming, and I definitely understand Stephen King’s reference to this book in The Institute now. In describing Arkady's meeting with an agent of the KGB: "[the KGB agent] might even start with a joke, establishing a fresh, more amiable relationship, perhaps describing their current misunderstanding as purely institutional. At a bathhouse, Arkady's superior, Chief Prosecutor Iamskoy, introduces Arkady to an American fur millionaire, John Osborne, who regularly visits Russia.The thriller of the 80s’ Time ‘Straight to the top of the international thriller class’ Guardian ‘Brilliantly worked, marvellously written . 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. What did bother me was its pacing and it's labyrinthine conspiracy where it seems that almost everybody was colluding with everyone else. Meanwhile, while checking the crime scene again at night Arkady disturbs a man with an American accent who attacks him.

The conflict that Arkady Renko has with himself as a good person dealt a bad hand, wanting to do the right thing even as he’s incredibly tempted to not, so as to protect himself. Gorky Park introduces Arkady Renko, Chief Investigator with the Moscow militia, set during the former Soviet Union under Secretary Brezhnev.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. He is a loose cannon, determined at all costs to solve the murder, and paying mere lip service to the Party - letting his membership lapse and unwilling to be bribed or 'influenced'.

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.I am very forgiving when it comes to getting things wrong about USSR; after all, not everyone lived there and not everyone knows the culture. Having been born and raised in this part of the world before 1989, I almost cannot believe how well an American author was able to capture the dreary, corrupt, existentially-dispiriting and hopeless atmosphere of the era, without moralizing and without futile and inapt comparisons to a cheery, hopeful, democratic "west".