GORKY PARK

Two men and a woman are found dead in the snow in Gorky Park, Moscow. Their faces and fingers have been removed and the men shot to prevent dental identification. Moscow militia Chief Investigator Arkady Renko doesn't really want the case and wants to hand it over to the KGB, even though he doesn't trust them, especially Major Pribluda who turns up at the murder scene.

When he discovers one of the dead is not a Soviet citizen but an American, he seems to have found his excuse. But his boss Iamskoy seems especially keen to keep the investigation going even though he's assigned a men to Arkady's team who appears to be a KGB informer. In the background, Arkady's marriage to a Party loyalist is collapsing, the blow softened when he meets an actress, Irina Asanova, after discovering the dead woman was wearing Irina's skates. What's her connection to the murder victims and to the American businessman Osborne, to whom Arkady is introduced in a KGB bathhouse by Iamskoy?

The ingredients of a good thriller are there - grisly murders, a loner down-at-heel investigator with woman trouble who doesn't do things by the book, chase sequences, evil foreign bad guys, shadowy sinister spies serving their own interests - all present and correct. Cruz Smith has gone to great lengths to give the feel of paranoia and good Cold War novel should have, plus portraying Arkady's endless frustrations with Soviet bureaucracy.

However, I found "Gorky Park" disappointing overall. It all felt a little formulaic to me, plus which I couldn't quite follow Arkady's thought processes and how he made his steps forward in the case, crucial, I think, to a novel of this type. That might just be me, though. I have had the same problem with the John Le Carré novels I've read. ( )