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

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If ''Gorky Park'' suffers from a flaw, it is one that is common among even the best examples of the genre. Cleverly and intelligently told, The Girl from Venice is a truly riveting tale of love, mystery and rampant danger.

The novel was praised for the authenticity with which it depicted life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. You see, managers and politicos both had learned from the much-ballyhooed corruption of the seventies. The Russian murderer had great faith in the inevitability of his capture, all he wanted was his moment onstage. Indeed, Renko’s diligent detective work leads him to the killer – and to a stark scene of confrontation when Renko confronts the killer, just as the killer is about to go into a party through the Kremlin’s Trinity Gate.

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.

Gorky Park was a major best-seller, vaulting Smith to fame after a decade as a moderately successful professional author. A wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain, Gorky Park is a tense, atmospheric, and memorable crime story. MCS nails the atmosphere of snowy, repressive Moscow in the 1980s when history still looks back to Stalin, WW2 and the siege of Leningrad.

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. The way Martin Cruz Smith manages to beautify the saddest and weakest vulnerabilities of human beings while showing that that is what makes us strong in the first place. Now we have our main characters and the scene – the Soviet Union of the Cold War, with all of the secrecy, informers and intrigue that we expect. Other reviewers have written that they gained a new appreciation for Cruz Smith only after traveling to this region of the world--this makes a lot of sense, as one can still sense the desperation and dreariness of the "eastern-block" soul of the era, even today, when traveling to former Communist countries. S. and Communist Russia are totally opposite but equally rotten, but then there's an intense final chase sequence that got me muttering at my iPod to hurry up and get it over with, so I guess that worked out.

It was also fascinating to learn how foreign visitors to Russia were treated - pretty much given free rein, and welcomed with open arms, but monitored closely and recorded during the entirety of their stay. 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. Or it can be done poorly, cramming in everything, and we wind up with Where's Waldo, and no one can figure out what the hell is happening.You literally feel like putting it aside and not picking it up for a while, but still feel like turning page after page at the same time! 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. What he isn’t prepared for are the three frozen bodies found in Gorky Park, with their faces skinned and fingertips cut off.

He is assigned to the case of three corpses found shot and mutilated in a famous park, and it seems like he keeps working on it for no reason other than the fact that it violated his personal sensibility that it's uncouth to murder people in a place where people come to relax, commiserate with friends, maybe do some ice skating. The dialogue between he and Renko at the end is reminiscent of the scene between Rakolnikov and Porfiry in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The female victim is wearing ice skates, reported missing in February by a former student dissident Irina Asanova, a girl from Siberia, working as a prop manager for Mosfilm.The thriller of the 80s’ Time ‘Straight to the top of the international thriller class’ Guardian ‘Brilliantly worked, marvellously written .