Gorky Park

⚖The case for it

Three bodies turn up near a skating rink with their faces and fingerprints removed, and what follows is less a murder plot than Moscow itself, “bitter-cold and vodka-sharp,” frozen streets and black-market survival and paperwork. Renko is honest and exhausted and “almost as flawed as the country he loves,” patriotic and disgusted at once. The forensic reconstruction of a face from a skull is the scene everyone remembers. The turf war with the KGB runs under everything, giving off “a stench of corruption and lies.” Readers report “the last few chapters were a rollercoaster.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The middle stalls under procedure and politics, with “endless lectures about Soviet history” where readers wanted an investigation and stretches of “no movement in the plot whatsoever.” Renko’s inner life is asserted rather than shown, so one reader reports flatly “he didn’t feel real to me.” The romance is “shrill (political) and unconvincing.” Attentive readers work out who is responsible well before the book concedes it. Readers without early-1980s Soviet politics find it needs footnoting now. “Life is too short and the book is too long.”

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings