Among the many very good qualities of Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, the best is its sense of place. From the opening page …, the tension is palpable in every scene.

More perhaps than any other recent work of American fiction, this one conveys a feeling for the Soviet Union, its capital, its moods and its people—which is all the more remarkable because Smith spent a total of two weeks in Moscow in 1973…. He manages, nonetheless, to portray cops, robbers, suspects and victims with an uncanny authenticity….

Most novels about the Soviets tend to caricature them into sinister stick figures: spies, dissidents, generals, political commissars. Not this one. The hero, homocide investigator Arkady Renko is, in his way, a Russian-style Sam Spade, skilled yet vulnerable, solitary yet capable of love. Humphrey Bogart would have been a natural for a film of the book.

The point is that Gorky...