First edition
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Author | Martin Cruz Smith |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Series | Arkady Renko # 1 |
Genre | Crime novel |
Publisher | Random House & GK Hall |
Publication date
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March 1981 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
Pages | 365 pp |
ISBN | |
OCLC | 6914272 |
813/.54 19 | |
LC Class | PS3569.M5377 G6 |
Followed by | Polar Star |
Gorky Park is a 1981 crime novel written by Martin Cruz Smith set in the Soviet Union.
Gorky Park is the first book in a series featuring the character Arkady Renko. Two books, Polar Star and Red Square, are also set during the Soviet era. Five further books take place after the fall of the Soviet Union. These are Havana Bay, set in communist Cuba; Wolves Eat Dogs, which follows Renko in the disaster of Chernobyl; Stalin's Ghost in which Arkady returns to a Russia led by Vladimir Putin, Three Stations and Tatiana.
The story follows Arkady Renko, a chief investigator for the Militsiya, who is assigned to a case involving three corpses found in Gorky Park, an amusement park in Moscow, who have had their faces and fingertips cut off by the murderer to prevent identification.
Despite being born into the nomenklatura himself, Renko exposes corruption and dishonesty on the part of influential and well-protected members of the elite, regardless of the consequences. A short episode of the book takes place in the United States, but when exposed to western capitalist society, he finds it to be equally corrupt and returns to the Soviet Union (while he may have found corruption in the West, in Red Square, it is stated that he returned to the Soviet Union in order to protect his love interest, Irina, from also being forced to return).