Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Arkady Renko is the son of a famous Russian General that he cannot stand.  He is the Chief Investigator of Homicides in Moscow.  But there are no murders in the USSR.  Except he is called out to a scene of discovered corpses in Gorky Park, two men and a woman, who have bullet wounds to the heart.  The two men were also shot through the mouth.  All three are missing their fingertips and their faces.  Major Plibludin, of the KGB barges into the scene and roughly frisks the bodies, contaminating the scene.  Renko wants him to take the case, but the KGB does not see any crime against the state, so they don’t want it.  Back home, Arkady’s marriage to a Russian celebrity is falling apart.   He can’t concentrate on anything other than the case.  One of the detectives assigned to him is a KGB informer.  He sends daily reports to the prosecutor.  He takes the skull of the woman and has her face reconstructed.  Every step of the way he is foiled in his attempts to either get the case transferred or the freedom to solve it.  The deeper he digs, the more he finds involvement from Siberians who have come to Moscow illegally, escaping the law, from an American deluded into believing he can rescue the Siberians, and a visious businessman with ties in Russia that go back to WWII.  Ultimately this becomes a tale of greed vs an honest man.