[What gives Martin Smith's Gorky Park] its force is the stunning assurance of his descriptions. Some are simple trivialities: how pine martens are caught in trees, the way the black market works, the prostitutes on Kazan station who chalk their price on their toe caps. Others are entire reconstructions of organisations: the militia; the Siberian fur trade; the Moscow metro. They may not all be true, but they sound right.

More so, perhaps, than do the characters. Arkady is no party-liner, no grey pillar of the Moscow intelligentsia, but the classic hero, the good cop in a corrupt and evil institution…. He is sympathetic, wry, scruffy—but he also seems to be immortal, recovering with surprising ease from a stabbing, several months' interrogation in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, and a shoot-out in which only the innocent are spared. The minor characters come alive through their vanities and confusions...