Gorky Park

⚖The case for it

Moscow police detective Arkady Renko investigates three mutilated bodies in Gorky Park; the trail leads to the KGB and a CIA operation. Smith wrote about the Soviet Union with ethnographic precision while delivering a perfect thriller. Renko is a great series detective: sensitive, stubborn, almost reluctant to survive.

— the canon

✕The case against

Renko's investigation winds through four hundred dense pages of Soviet procedure toward its secret, which turns out to be smuggled sables. Sables. A final act in New York trades Moscow's menace for a Staten Island shootout, and the Irina romance demands more faith than the faceless-corpse forensics. Atmosphere is the payoff here; the plot is fur.

— the honest librarian