Gorky Park

As a child of the eighties I grew up in the Cold War, where the Soviet Union was the enemy…but most Americans didn’t know anything about it. 

Gorky Park peeled back the curtain on the day-to-day lives of a few not-so-average Russians. The hugely successful novel features Moscow policeman Arkady Renko investigating a murder that has international repercussions. This novel opened a window into a foreign world that few people in the West had ever seen—in addition to being very smartly written. 

Even today this novel is fascinating, and it spawned half a dozen more sequels starring Renko.

I’ve read all of this author’s books. His protagonist is wonderfully flawed, which makes him believable. He is a romantic despite overwhelming odds against any relationship enduring the obstacles. His persistence and patience will ultimately prevail in the most creative way. No happy ending is ever without some exceptions, which I appreciate and which also inspires me to leave a few loose strings at the end of my novels so the reader can fill in the blanks as they see fit.

This novel is now forty years old, but it’s such a marvelous piece of mystery writing that it’s still worth recommending to any aspiring novelist who hasn’t read it. This is the introduction of Cruz’s wonderful Russian cop, Arkady Renko, one of the best characters in crime fiction. Smith’s writing carefully and skillfully invokes for us a sense of Soviet-era society, the dangers lurking in it, both unique and universal, and shows us how Renko navigates his way through it all to find out what has happened and why. What this book should teach a writer is how well it… show more.