Simon & Schuster
Published July 8, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
For those who have followed the career of Arkady Renko since he first appeared in 1981’s Gorky Park, there’s dispiriting news below the title: This is the final Renko novel. There’s no doubt the Russian investigator deserves a quiet retirement; he’s been investigating crimes for over forty years, through the end of the Soviet era, into the unsettled period of the looting of public resources by new-made oligarchs, and into Putin’s iron-fisted regime. Moreover, he’s been diagnosed, like the author, with Parkinson’s disease. But readers will be reluctant to let him go. He’s one of the most intriguing and complex of crime fiction’s heroes, and a thoroughly Russian guide, however ambivalent, to his country through decades of upheaval. He may be retiring, but he’s not slowing down, even if it means following leads into Ukraine in the early months of Putin’s brutal invasion.