This has been on my list for a long time. A lot has changed since this was published in 1981, but it reads well even post-Cold War. Arkady Renko is Moscow's chief homicide investigator when three bodies are found in Gorky Park, a popular pleasure center near Red Square. The investigation is enjoyably complex and involves nasty encounters with the KGB and, because it's Moscow in 1980, Americans too, as though that city and its people couldn't exist without a capitalist foil. Renko is an archetypical investigator: tough, smart, with impeccable ethics and tortured relationships with women. But the character's predictable contours enhance the story, somehow, perhaps leaving Cruz Smith freer to craft an intricate plot and saturate it with an amazing level of local detail. I don't know if it was accurately researched but I hope so - I finished the book almost feeling like I'd visited the time and place. If you've never read this, I strongly recommend it.
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