What is truly fascinating [about Gorky Park] is not Smith's Byzantine plot (it's about fur-smuggling, icon-forging, and dissident activities), but the absolute reality of the illusion that we have entered into Soviet life. Scenes and characterizations leap off the page with the clarity and coherence of photographs….

The first police procedural novel to be set in the Soviet Union, Gorky Park is spellbinding in its view of an obstructive bureaucracy and destructive KGB at war with a lone detective. Renko's competence poses the kind of internal threat to the Soviet justice system which makes him vulnerable. The question of his vulnerability assumes a major role in the reader's expectations, and this concern for Renko's safety gradually creates a close bond between reader and hero. But Smith also earns our admiration by allowing us the fun of trying to outguess the shrewd Renko. If the Russian sleuth never quite...