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

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Months later, Arkady is brought before a KGB General who confirms what Arkady already suspected: that Kostia Borodin (an expert hunter) and Valerya helped Osborne to trap and smuggle live sables - the only high-quality fur-bearing animal on which the Soviet Union enjoys a monopoly - out of Russia. Renko has also appeared in Polar Star, Red Square, Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, Stalin's Ghost, and Three Stations.

There is no "happy ending" here, no neat story arc tied with a bow and concluded in a satisfactory way. There was so much reliance on the political and inter-country relationships at the crux of the story that I think it would leave anyone who wasn’t living in 1981 Russia feeling a little lost. While I found the settings fascinating (Moscow, Siberia and New York in Soviet era times) and the descriptions very atmospheric, I found my lack of knowledge of Soviet era Russia slightly hindered my understanding of the seemingly over-complex plot.What sets this suspenseful 1981 novel apart is Martin Cruz Smith's meticulous portrayal, in vivid and stunning detail, of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union prior to perestroika and the Soviet Union's dissolution. When a key witness and a colleague are gunned down Arkady tries to save Irina from the same fate, only to learn that he is being framed for a murder of a friend. Renko's love interest, Irina, was likewise revealed to have been institutionalized for similarly false "psychiatric problems" and forcibly treated at some earlier time, resulting in a tumor that left her with a severe facial blemish and blind in one eye. So the hook here is that it’s a mystery set in the Soviet Union, and even though that era has come and gone, it’s still incredibly interesting to get this peek behind the old Iron Curtain.

I believe that I attempted to read the book once before, perhaps shortly after it's publication, but did not finish. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. 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.The plot is pretty complicated, as you'd expect, but the trappings (you'll see what I did there in a second) are pretty fun.