Martin Cruz Smith, bestselling author of "Gorky Park," dies at 82

Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania, he studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and started out as a journalist, including a brief stint at the AP and at the Philadelphia Daily News. His novel came out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still very much alive and centered on Renko's investigation into the murders of three people whose bodies were found in the Moscow park that Smith used for the book's title. Smith's Renko books were inspired in part by his own travels and he would trace the region's history over the past 40 years, whether the Soviet Union's collapse ("Red Square"), the rise of Russian oligarchs ("The Siberian Dilemma"), or, in the novel "Wolves Eats Dogs," the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.