Wolves Eat Dogs

We're in modern Moscow--swimming in color, all neon and bling. But with high times and towers of glass come high stakes, and when a pillar of new capitalism plummets 10 flights from his opulent digs to the pavement below, it brings Smith's gloomy, lovelorn hero, Arkady Renko, onto the case. Then another body--one of the tycoon's associates--turns up near Chernobyl, mangled and ravaged by wolves. What gives? And what's happening in the toxic villages in the reactor's environs? The ensuing plot is compelling, but so, too, are the descriptions of the wasteland and the empty lives that are the detritus of the nuclear disaster. Ron McLarty narrates the story with power and care, conveying both the images of the ruined landscape of the "zone of exclusion" and, with subtle accenting, the worn-out spirits of its inhabitants. M.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 6, 2004
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.

WOLVES EAT DOGS
Martin Cruz Smith
. Simon & Schuster
, $25.95 (352p) ISBN 0-684-87254-4

Smith's melancholy, indefatigable Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has been exiled to some bitter venues in the past—including blistering-hot Cuba in Havana Bay
and the icy Bering sea in Polar Star
—but surely the strangest (and most fascinating) is his latest, the eerie, radioactive landscape of post-meltdown Chernobyl. Renko is called in to investigate the 10-story, plunge-to-the-pavement death of Pasha Ivanov, fabulously wealthy president of Moscow's NoviRus corporation, whose death is declared a suicide by Renko's boss, Prosecutor Zurin. Renko, being Renko, isn't sure it's suicide and wonders about little details like the bloody handprints on the windowsill and the curious matter of the closet filled with 50 kilos of salt. And why is NoviRus's senior vice-president Lev Timofeyev's nose bleeding? Renko asks too many questions, so an annoyed Zurin sends him off to Chernobyl to investigate when Timofeyev turns up in the cemetery in a small Ukrainian town with his throat slit and his face chewed on by wolves. The cemetery lies within the dangerously radioactive 30-kilometer circle called the Zone of Exclusion, populated by a contingent of scientists, a detachment of soldiers and those—the elderly, the crooks, the demented—who have sneaked back to live in abandoned houses and apartments. The secret of Ivanov and Timofeyev's deaths lies somewhere in the Zone, and the dogged Renko, surrounded by wolves both animal and human, refuses to leave until he unravels the mystery. It's the Zone itself and the story of Chernobyl that supplies the riveting backbone of this novel. Renko races around the countryside on his Uralmoto motorcycle, listening always to the ominous ticking of his dosimeter as it counts the dangerous levels of radioactivity present in the food, the soil, the air and the people themselves as they lie, cheat, love, steal, kill and die. Agent, Knox Burger. 7-city author tour.