Then he and Irina might not get away. Perhaps the FBI watched the windows of their room all the time. Arkady had never driven an American car; who knew how it worked? They could get lost. Maps, at least in the Soviet Union, were deliberately inaccurate. Perhaps he and Irina were so plainly Russian that everyone would recognize them as fugitives. Besides, he was an ignorant man in a foreign country. (p. 410) A triple murder and Arkady Renko son of a Soviet Hero is put on the case and he really tries to put the case into the hands of his KGB colleagues but they seem not to interested. He has to solve this case even if one of the victims is an American which normally is enough ground for the KGB to interfere. So Renko has to solve a case, save his marriage, save his own life from the Soviet State wrath. Smith won a scholarship to a local private school and says his experience slightly echoed that of the post-war English grammar-school boy. "I remember being punched in the street for no reason by this kid who was my friend at the public [state] school. He was letting me know that if I was going to a rich-kid school things had changed." For a time he was hospitalised with polio but recovered well enough to be a good school wrestler. He "sneaked through" graduation and his headmaster had to make a special request to the University of Pennsylvania to take him for a sociology course. But he failed a statistics paper and changed to creative writing. Arkady Renko is a great character. He knows how the system works, sees no problem in "losing" the files on a few murder cases to keep the crime rate low and the politicians happy. Yet he refuses to follow the party line, pisses off the wrong people, follows leads when he has no vested interest, not even a strong desire for justice. He just wants to be right. 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.

O'Brien, Timothy L. The New York Times (August 6, 2007). Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series: A trail of clues to the Russian soul i9296283x |b1070001164236 |dflgmn |g- |m |h3 |x0 |t0 |i0 |j18 |k150516 |o- |aPS3569.M5377 |rG6 1981

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With all this red scare stuff going on, it seemed like a great to time revisit this old favorite. It’s the early ‘80s and three bodies have been found under the snow in Moscow’s Gorky Park with their fingertips removed and their faces peeled off to prevent identification. Militia chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko finds an enemy of his from the KGB on the scene showing an interest in the bodies, and that can mean nothing but trouble. As he reluctantly begins to investigate the murders and discovers that one of the bodies was an American, Renko wants nothing more than to dump the case on the KGB since he’s pretty sure they killed those people anyhow. However, Renko soon finds himself embroiled in schemes that may mean that he’s the only who gets punished for trying to be a detective in a society that doesn’t want to admit that crime exists at all. And we aging Boomers, fagged like the flagging fox at the snarls and yelps of an inhuman onrush of an exponentially new set of rules in the name of Blind Progress, now have to admit we’re flummoxed and finished. But, you know - reading it in the eighties, I was concurrently witnessing colossal transformations in the same office which was the milieu for my reading - strikingly similar to changes occurring now. Some books: 1970 The Indians Won; '71 Gypsy in Amber; '72 Canto for a Gypsy; '77 Nightwing; '81 Gorky Park; '86 Stallion Gate; '89 Polar Star; '92 Red Square; '96 Rose; '99 Havana Bay; 2002 Tokyo Station; '05 Wolves Eat Dogs. When the book was eventually finished, Smith says: "I knew I'd delivered. And it was wonderful that my two girls were then just old enough to realise what had happened and how the wheel of fortune had turned for us." All his subsequent books have been dedicated to his wife, "Em", who taught English as a foreign language and is widely credited as being an astute early editor of his work. They have three children, Nell, Luisa and Sam, and three grandchildren, and live in an affluent small town 15 minutes north of San Francisco. Smith is proud that its demographics would make it a Republican stronghold in most other places in America. He says his family grew up thinking "FDR was God" and he has retained his liberalism. "My first book, The Indians Won, was quite political and I'm still proud of that. In the years since I've written novels that didn't work, but I've never written one that in some way didn't express a view."

Arkady reluctantly pays a visit to his father, retired Red Army General Renko, a.k.a. " Stalin's Favorite General", a.k.a. "The Butcher of Ukraine". The elder Renko remembers that Osborne was an O.S.S. officer attached to the Red Army during the Nazi invasion, tasked with interrogating three captured S.S. officers. Thanks to his charm and fluent German, Osborne got the information he needed from the officers over a friendly picnic in the countryside, then shot all three of them dead - almost exactly the manner in which the three bodies in Gorky Park were killed. Despite being born into the nomenklatura himself, Arkady exposes corruption and dishonesty on the part of influential and well-protected members of the elite, regardless of the consequences. This rebounds on him when his own superior, Iamskoy, and his best friend, a lawyer named Misha, are both revealed to be working with Osborne. Arkady flees a meeting with Misha before a gang of killers arrive, but is too late to prevent Iamskoy from appropriating the reconstructed head and destroying it. Arkady confronts Osborne at gunpoint as he is about to leave the country, but Osborne informs him that Iamskoy has already kidnapped Irina, and if Arkady lets Osborne go and rushes to the university campus, he might be just in time to save her. Arkady does so, killing Iamskoy and Osborne's chief henchman, but suffering a near fatal stomach wound. Smith says with two young children and a flat in New York City, money was nearly always a problem. "I was making less money each year so I bought a movie magazine to figure out what the hell people wanted. There seemed to be lots of killer animals, sharks, bees. I'd seen a newspaper report about vampire bats so I wrote up a story with vampire bats and some Hopi shamanism and my agent sold it within a day." If the frigid claustrophobia of Moscow is what makes the first half of the book such wonderfully dark reading, it’s the second half where the author proves his brilliance. Renko’s enemies catch up with him and he’s critically wounded. He’s sent south to recover in a hospital where he’s the only patient. A prisoner and patient, he’s interrogated relentlessly, but won’t cave in. Major Pribluda is sent to guard him. And though the man once seemed his nemesis, Renko realises that even this KGB officer is human. There’s a symmetry between the two men – they define each other.In describing wiretapping by the KGB of foreign hotels: "The French all complained about the food, and the Americans and English all complained about the waiters. Travel was so irritating." Arkady Renko is chief homicide investigator for Moscow's Soviet militsiya (the city's civilian police force). When investigating the murder of three American college students found frozen in the snow of Gorky Park, faces and fingers removed, Renko faces resistance from the KGB, FBI and NYC police.