GORKY PARK (Classic Mystery Fiction)

A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible - and tries to stay alive doing it.

POLAR STAR

Arkady Renko has made too many enemies and now he toils in obscurity on a Russian factory ship in the middle of the Bering Sea. But when a female crew member is picked up dead with the day's catch, Arkady becomes obsessed with the case and once again discovers more than he wants to know and certainly more than he bargained for....

RED SQUARE

Arkady Renko returns in a masterly new thriller set in contemporary Moscow and Germany. The Communist party is dead, the ruble is worthless, and the Russian mafia is the only part of the country that works. After the brutal death of a black-market banker, Arkady butts heads with the ruling elite, the mob bosses.

HAVANA BAY

The body, at least what was left of it, was drifting in Havana Bay the morning Arkady arrived from Moscow. Only the day before, he had received an urgent message from the Russian embassy in Havana that his friend Pribluda was missing and asking that he come. The Cubans insisted that this corpse floating in an inner tube was Pribluda, but Arkady wasn't so sure. "You don't investigate assault, you don't investigate murder. Just what do you investigate?" Arkady asks Ofelia Osorio, a detective in the Policía Nacional de la Revolución. "Or is it simply open season on Russians in Havana?" The comrades of the Cold War have parted bitterly, and the Russians who used to swarm through Havana's streets are now as rare as they are despised, much more so than Americans. Havana is overrun with color, music, and suspicion. The Revolution's heroes have outlived idealism. The Communist world has shrunk to Cuba. Paradise has become a stop on sex tours. It is a city of empty stores and talking drums, Karl Marx and sharp machetes, where an American radical rides around in Hemingway's car to tout island investments and a Wall Street developer on the run from the FBI flies a pirate flag. "A dead Russian, a live Russian," Ofelia says. "What's the difference?" But the dead Russian is followed by the murders of a Cuban boxer and a prostitute. Although none of them is supposed to be investigated, Arkady cannot be stopped. He speaks no Spanish, knows nothing about Cuba, and, as a Russian, is a pariah. However, there is something about this faded, lovely, dangerous city - the rhythms of waves against the seawall, the insinuation of music always in the air, and, finally, Ofelia herself - that plunges Arkady back into life.

GYPSY IN AMBER

A murder threatens to force the police into a confrontation with New York's gypsy community. The cops are determined to pin the blame on a gypsy. But Roman Grey knows there is more to the case than the convenient closing of a crime file, and vows to bring the truly guilty to justice.

CANTO FOR A GYPSY

The priceless Royal Crown of Hungary was on display in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Guarded by many, including the NYPD and the gypsy, Roman Grey, a heist was impossible. But it happened, and murder, mayhem and all hell broke loose.

NIGHTWING

Driven by blood-hunger across the American landscape, they bred and multiplied, unseen and unsuspected, each one a grisly messenger of death. No warm-blooded creature is safe from their thirst. Now, as darkness gathers, the sky is filled with the frantic motion, the maddening murmur of . . . Nightwing.

STALLION GATE

In a New Mexico blizzard, four men cross a barbed-wire fence at Stallion Gate to select a test site for the first atomic weapon. They are Oppenheimer, the physicist; Groves, the general; Fuchs, the spy. The fourth man is Sergeant Joe Pena, a hero, informer, fighter, musician, Indian. These four men - and a cast of soldiers, roughnecks and scientists - will change history forever.

ROSE

The American adventurer Jonathan Blair has been chased by scandal out of West Africa to the stranger land of Victorian England. Gin-soaked and shaking from malaria, he must travel to Wigan, a town in the darkest part of England, to solve the mysterious disappearance of a young cleric. Nineteenth-century Wigan is two worlds. On the surface it is a serene baize-green land of the moneyed. But in the pits that reach a mile below the surface lurks a separate world where coal miners eke out their short, violent lives covered in black dust. And while the world on the surface may have fine ladies, the world of miners has pit girls, the social and sexual scandal of the country. The missing cleric, John Maypole, has crossed the line. He was engaged to Charlotte, the daughter of the bishop who owns the mine. But Charlotte is as cold as ice, and Maypole seems to have had a fatal encounter with the opposite sort of woman, an earthy, unforgettable pit girl - Rose. Maypole vanished the same day that seventy-six men died in an explosion and firedamp in the bishop's mine. Blair finds himself involved with the workers who make the bishop rich, miners whose existence is marked by brutal labor and blood sports, and pit girls notorious even in London - and with his own shadowy origins.

DECEMBER 6

Set in the crazed, nationalistic Tokyo of late 1941, December 6 explores the coming world war through the other end of history's prism - a prism held here by an unforgettable rogue and lover, Harry Niles. In many ways, Niles is as American as apple pie: raised by ultra-protective missionary parents, taught to honor and respect his elders and be an upright Christian citizen. But Niles is also Japanese: reared in the aesthetics of Shinto and educated in the dance halls and back room poker gatherings of Tokyo's shady underworld. As a gaijin, a foreigner - especially one with a gift for the artful scam - he draws suspicion and disfavor from Japanese police. This potent mixture of stiff tradition and intrigue - not to mention his brazen love affair with a Japanese mistress who would rather kill Harry than lose him - fills Harry's final days in Tokyo with suspense and fear. Who is he really working for? Is he a spy? For America? For the Emperor? Now, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Harry himself must decide where his true allegiances lie.