Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith is a 365-page hardcover published by Random House New York, 1981.  The dust jacket has shelf wear and some cover wear.  The cover of the book has some surface wear.  Inside, the front end page is missing.  The rest of the book is clean and unmarked. 

Book Summary

Once in a long while a novel appears whose plot is so original, atmosphere so authentic, characters so vivid, execution so skillful and premise so true that it reverberates long after the reader has finished its last page.  Gorky Park is such a novel. 

When three mutilated bodies are discovered in the deep snow of Moscow's Gorky Park, and Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko is beaten to the site by a KGB agent, Major Pribluda, he knows that these are no ordinary murders.  As head of the Homicide Department of the Moscow Town Prosecutor's office, Arkady's cases generally are typically Russian (which is to say that they involve approximately equal doses of vodka, jealousy, boredom and despair).  Usually, too, the KGB leave Arkady alone; it is understood that his job consists of picking up the everyday corpse, while political crimes are left to them. 

But these victims, Arkady soon realizes, are part of a seemingly motiveless crime both ruthless and bizarre.  And though his every move in the case is monitored by the KGB, he is puzzled that they don't take on the case themselves, especially when, strangely, a New York City detective obsessed with avenging one of the victims beats Arkady almost to death, and a powerful American businessman who basks in a luxurious bathhouse with the Kremlin's apparatchiks also appear to be implicated in the brutal murders.  Even more unsettling to Arkady is his interrogation of Irina, a dissident at Mosfilm, the Soviet film studio.  He falls in love with her, even though he cannot trust anyone in an investigation that reaches to the highest levels of Community heirarchy.