Although critics have often assumed that Gorky Park is simply a thriller or adventure novel, a good case can also be made for including it in the police procedural tradition. This increasingly popular genre, whose major exponents have been the American writers Ed McBain and Hilary Waugh and their English counterpart J. J. Marric, typically provides a nuts-and-bolts account of a police force's standard operating procedures along with the usual components of a mystery story. The sociological material that results can, if effectively utilized, add a firmly realistic foundation to what might otherwise be just another cops-and -robbers story; and while Gorky Park is certainly not one of the latter, its descriptions of Arkady Renko's methods of work are both intrinsically fascinating and exotically unfamiliar to Western readers.

The second half of the book introduces a New York City detective into the middle of...