[1][2] Set in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Gorky Park is the first book in a series featuring the character Arkady Renko, a Moscow homicide investigator.

These are Havana Bay, set in communist Cuba; Wolves Eat Dogs, which follows Renko in the disaster of Chernobyl; Stalin's Ghost, in which Arkady returns to a Russia led by Vladimir Putin; Three Stations; Tatiana; The Siberian Dilemma; and Independence Square.

Ice skates found on the woman's body lead Arkady to Irina Asanova, a wardrobe girl at a movie studio, who claims that she reported them stolen, and has no idea how they ended up with the victims.

Arkady gives the woman's skull to Professor Andreev, an anthropologist at Moscow University, who specializes in reconstructing whole faces from bone structure.

When Irina is attacked on the Moscow underground, Arkady hides her in his own apartment, vacant since his wife, Zoya, left him for one of her colleagues at the school where she teaches.

Thanks to his charm and fluent German, Osborne got the information he needed from the officers over a friendly picnic in the countryside, then shot all three of them dead - almost exactly the manner in which the three bodies in Gorky Park were killed.

Arkady flees a meeting with Misha before a gang of killers arrive, but is too late to prevent Iamskoy from appropriating the reconstructed head and destroying it.

In spite of his weakened state, Arkady laughs when he realizes from his interrogators' questions that Iamskoy was himself a high-ranking KGB officer, planted as a spy in the militsiya, and his superiors were badly embarrassed to find that he betrayed them to help Osborne.

Realizing that the only way to reduce his superiors' ire is to kill all the illicit sables, Arkady picks up Osborne's hunting rifle, but instead he decides to break open their cages and release them into the forest.

While the syndrome itself is fictional, the incident also alludes to the very real Soviet practice of diagnosing dissidents with "sluggish schizophrenia", and of forcibly treating them with psychotropic drugs.

Renko's love interest, Irina, was likewise revealed to have been institutionalized for similarly false "psychiatric problems" and forcibly treated at some earlier time, resulting in a tumor that left her with a severe facial blemish and blind in one eye.

[4] The Washington Post said of Gorky Park that "More perhaps than any other recent work of American fiction, this one conveys a feeling for the Soviet Union, its capital, its moods and its people.

[8] Although the authenticity of Gorky Park is often praised, Cruz Smith spent only two weeks in Russia researching the book, relying mostly on libraries and interviews with Russian immigrants in the United States for the details about life in Cold War Moscow.

[9] In 1983 a film adaptation of the novel was released starring William Hurt as Arkady, Joanna Pacula as Irina, Lee Marvin as Osborne and Brian Dennehy as Kirwill.