The principal character in Red Square is, of course, Investigator Arkady Renko. The entire narrative is viewed from his perspective. Smith exploits fully the advantage of a series protagonist. Renko brings to the novel the baggage of a personal history acquired in Gorky Park (1981) and Polar Star (1989). In the first of these he debuted as a Soviet detective with a hard-boiled toughness and integrity who undeterredly pursued his inquiry into a triple murder in Moscow's Gorky Park, despite its impolitic ramifications for highly placed Party members. His reward was an exile to a factory ship in the Bering Sea in Polar Star, where his undiminished investigative skills helped to rehabilitate him. In Red Square, he has returned to Moscow. The powerful Party apparatus which opposed him in Gorky Park is now, in the era of Gorbachev, a much diminished thing, but Renko's investigation into the murder of a...