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imalwayswrite's review against another edition
3.0
Arakdy Renko is back in Moscow and working as an investigator once again. While investigating the death of a black market speculator, he runs up against various Russian mafias. During the course of his investigation, he travels to Germany and comes across stolen artwork.
Renko is his usual resourceful self and although he has his job back, he isn't a cool, slick detective. Still, he gets the job done.
Renko is his usual resourceful self and although he has his job back, he isn't a cool, slick detective. Still, he gets the job done.
nigellicus's review
5.0
I grew up with my parents getting a succession of Cold War spy thrillers from the library every two weeks, where the evil agents of the Soviet Union enacted arcane and incomprehensible plots against The West that often resulted in a climactic and suspenseful climax involving the threat of global thermonuclear war. It tends to shape your perceptions a little, and I got into the habit of reading the last page of these books to see if the world survived, perhaps hoping to read auguries of our likely future, and mostly the spies and the soldiers of the West saved the day. Though not always.
Anyway, Gorky Park comes along, a police thriller set in Russia with Russian characters and a Russian hero and apparently nothing to do with global thermonuclear war and it felt like an anomaly. I never read it, just in case the world sneakily blew up halfway through, but I saw the film. Russian life from a Russian POV as portrayed by a western author. Weird.
So I recently rewatched the film on Netflix and that spurred me to order up Red Square from the library, since at some point in the intervening years I did read Polar Star. And... wow.
Though written near enough to contemporaneous with events, this has the feel of a historical thriller that engages in carefully and meticulous world-building to recreate a lost period - the sights, sounds, smells and lives of Russia after the fall of the Wall, with the people wretched and starving, queuing endlessly for food and vodka, gangs on rise and gangster hypercapitalism revving up to its various excesses.
Arkady Renko, back from exile in Siberia, now with his own team. When an informant is murdered horribly one night at a black market he finds himself pushing against all the usual sorts of official and unofficial resistance, even rediscovering the voice of his lost love. Renko follows the tangled bloody trail with dogged determination, all the way to a climax on the steps of the Moscow White House during the coup.
This is so astonishingly well-written, it's almost mesmerising. I'm definitely getting the rest of the books in the series, and might even loop back to the first two. Its possible the world will blow up before I get to the end, or perhaps that's just another silly childhood fear.
Anyway, Gorky Park comes along, a police thriller set in Russia with Russian characters and a Russian hero and apparently nothing to do with global thermonuclear war and it felt like an anomaly. I never read it, just in case the world sneakily blew up halfway through, but I saw the film. Russian life from a Russian POV as portrayed by a western author. Weird.
So I recently rewatched the film on Netflix and that spurred me to order up Red Square from the library, since at some point in the intervening years I did read Polar Star. And... wow.
Though written near enough to contemporaneous with events, this has the feel of a historical thriller that engages in carefully and meticulous world-building to recreate a lost period - the sights, sounds, smells and lives of Russia after the fall of the Wall, with the people wretched and starving, queuing endlessly for food and vodka, gangs on rise and gangster hypercapitalism revving up to its various excesses.
Arkady Renko, back from exile in Siberia, now with his own team. When an informant is murdered horribly one night at a black market he finds himself pushing against all the usual sorts of official and unofficial resistance, even rediscovering the voice of his lost love. Renko follows the tangled bloody trail with dogged determination, all the way to a climax on the steps of the Moscow White House during the coup.
This is so astonishingly well-written, it's almost mesmerising. I'm definitely getting the rest of the books in the series, and might even loop back to the first two. Its possible the world will blow up before I get to the end, or perhaps that's just another silly childhood fear.
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