[If] you stop and consider it objectively, "Gorky Park" winds down to a rather clichéd international shoot-'em-up, complete with murky speculations on the difference between American and Soviet justice, bewildering shifts in the various characters' apparent motivations and the somewhat shopworn implication that modern state bureaucracies spend more time double-crossing each other than they do looking out for the people they are supposed to serve.

But in truth we don't really look at the end of this novel too objectively. We are still under the spell of its beginning and middle, because for its first two-thirds … "Gorky Park" is superb.

It is superb in its sense of mystery….

It is superb in its pacing, in the way it knits together coincidence and logical consequence to form a pattern of steadily accelerating excitement. Most of all, it is superb in its evocation of the Moscow atmosphere—or at...