Rostnikov confronts a mystery that stretches from Moscow to the stars Once, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin. But the Soviet Union is dead, and the days of Gagarin's glory are long passed. For the men and women aboard the decaying Mir space station, life is an unending series of near-disasters. During one such breakdown, cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka asks ground control to contact Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov if...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “Sharply, evocatively written and elaborately plotted . . . [Red Square] should find as many friends as did Gorky Park.”—The Washington Post Book World
Back from exile in the hellish reaches of the Soviet Union, homicide investigator Arkady Renko discovers that his country, his Moscow, even his job, are nearly dead. But...

Arkady Renko returns for his most enigmatic and baffling case: the death of one of Russia's new billionaires, which leads him to the Zone of Exclusion - Chernobyl, and the surrounding areas closed to the world since the nuclear disaster of 1986. In his groundbreaking Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith created one of the iconic detectives of contemporary fiction, Arkady Renko. Cynical, quietly subversive, brilliantly analytical and haunted by melancholy,...

A century-old mystery takes Rostnikov halfway around the world In the waning days of the Russian Empire, the Czar inked a secret treaty with Japan that was stolen en route by one of the workmen on the Trans-Siberian Railway. More than a one hundred years later, the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Czardom, and police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is trying to find his way in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. A large amount of money is being sent from...

When Moscow's Organized Crime Bureau chief Dimitri Danilov teams up once more with William Cowley, head of the FBI's Russian desk, their attempt to thwart a unified global mafia makes for Brian Freemantle's most unique and explosive Danilov/Cowley thriller yet. Their mission: to stop the Mafias of the U.S., Russia, and Italy from forming themselves into an organized crime conglomerate with the power to, quite literally, rule the world. Their investigation...

To save her sister, who, along with her American diplomat husband and children, is trapped behind the Iron Curtain, Ruth Macallister embarks on a dangerous mission, and as the sisters race toward safety, a dogged Soviet agent forces them to make a heartbreaking choice.

Murder intrudes on a Moscow cop's vacation Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is finding spring in Yalta to be quite lovely. Accompanying his wife, Sarah, as she gets much needed rest and recuperation after her surgery, reading American crime novels, and gazing at the Black Sea, the Moscow cop is reasonably content-even if his superiors did insist that he take this vacation. But his time off is destined to be short-lived. A former colleague with emphysema...