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"Why would anyone jump out a window with a saltshaker?" A good question, especially when the suicide victim is Pasha Ivanov, a Moscow physicist-turned-billionaire businessman--a "New Russian" poster boy, if ever there was one--with several homes, a leggy 20-year-old girlfriend ("the kind [of blonde] who could summon the attention of a breeze"), and every reason to be contented in his middle age. So, wonders Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, in Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, what provoked Ivanov to take a header from his stylish 10th-floor apartment? And how does it relate to the shaker clutched in his dead hand or the hillock of table salt found on his closet floor?
Renko, introduced in Smith's 1981 bestseller, Gorky Park, is a cop well out of sync with rapidly changing Russian society, "a difficult investigator, a holdover from the Soviet era, a man on the skids" whose determination to do more than go through the motions of criminal inquiries inevitably exasperates his superiors. Thus, when this saturnine detective declines to accept the verdict that Ivanov did himself in--who peppered that salt around the capitalist's premises, Renko still wants to know, and what about rumors of a security breach at Ivanov's apartment building?--he is exiled to the Ukrainian Zone of Exclusion, the "radioactive wasteland" surrounding Chernobyl, site of a notorious 1986 nuclear disaster and the place where, only a week after Ivanov's demise, his company's senior vice-president is found with his throat slit. There, among cynical scientists, entrepreneurial scavengers, and predators both two- and four-legged--an exclusive coterie of the rejected--Renko chews over the crimes on his plate. Unfortunately, the dosimeter that warns him of radiation exposure at Chernobyl does not also protect him from a pair of malevolent brothers, or a "damaged" woman doctor offering him mutually assured disappointment.
Smith has a keen eye for the comical quirks of modern-day Russia--its chaotic roadways, voracious appetite for post-communist luxuries, and evolving ethics ("Russians used to kill for women or power, real reasons. Now they kill for money"). And this story's bleakly beautiful Ukrainian backdrop nicely complements the desperate hope of Renko's task. Still, the greatest strength of Wolves Eat Dogs (Smith's fifth series installment, after Havana Bay) is its characters, especially Arkady Renko, who despite his lugubrious nature continues to show a heart as expansive and unfathomable as the Siberia steppe. --J. Kingston Pierce
From Publishers Weekly
Tenacious Senior Investigator Arkady Renko is on another tough case, and this time even the air is dangerous. He is a man of few words and little nonsense, whose vulnerable heart and dogged temerity are his weaknesses. Smith's old-school Soviet detective, introduced in 1981's Gorky Park, isn't one to let a trail go cold. After being called off a suspicious suicide case, he is sent to the "Zone of Exclusion" (the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident) to investigate a tangential case. The Zone, where Renko's dosimeter constantly ticks at the amount of deadly radiation that pollutes everything, is occupied by scientists, eccentrics and old folks who have crept back into the ghost towns to live outside society. McLarty's naturally husky voice is well suited to the surly-yet-soft Renko, and his straightforward reading is fittingly raw for a tale where a shroud of bleakness taints even love affairs. With a voice like a keyed-down Don La Fontaine (the ubiquitous voiceover artist famous for the line, "In a world beyond imagination..."), McLarty's hearty, slightly raspy bass strikes an appropriate tone for the dangerous netherworld of post-Soviet Russia. His subtle variances and accents are practically unnoticeable, which is as it should be. Simultaneous release with the S&S hardcover. (Forecasts, Sept. 6, 2004). (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Arkady’s travails have followed the former Soviet Union’s uneven transition from the KGB and Cold War to the "New Russia" of black markets, poverty, and glitz. Wolves is a standard procedural mystery that starts with a white-collar crime—one thinks, anyway. Lest fans be disappointed, the book turns ugly soon enough. Critics agree that Smith’s look at the social, economic, and political landscape of the Zone of Exclusion’s eerie "black villages," the area surrounding the nuclear reactor meltdown of 1986, is first rate. Arkady, of course, is his usual darkly witty self. Other characters weigh in a little light, and the conclusion leaves some loose ends. But remember, this is the indefatigable Arkady, and he’ll march on, comrade or no comrade. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From AudioFile
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. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The terminally melancholic Russian investigator Arkady Renko, whose cynicism is perpetually at war with his need to dig a little deeper, was last seen five years ago in Havana, where the rusting idealism of post-Soviet Cuba mirrored the detective's ravaged inner life. Leave it to Cruz Smith to find an even more evocative setting for the battered Renko: the Zone of Exclusion, the dreaded no-man's land around Chernobyl, an officially abandoned, contaminated area where a bizarre assortment of stubborn Ukrainians, crazed entrepreneurs, and determined researchers continue to live in the shadow of Reactor Four, the "sarcophagus," site of the world 's worst nuclear accident. The case that takes Renko to Chernobyl involves the death of Pasha Ivanov, a billionaire businessman, symbol of the New Russia. Why would such a man commit suicide, jumping from the window of his Moscow apartment, and why was his closet floor covered with salt? Renko, the perennial outsider whose career is officially on the skids ("Some men march confidently from one historical era to another; others skid"), is assigned the simple task of sweeping the suicide under the rug, but naturally, he does the opposite, obsessed by the seemingly inexplicable salt and determined, as always, to keep digging no matter how loudly the bureaucrats scream. Perhaps that's why Renko feels oddly comfortable in Chernobyl: the bureaucrats are out of earshot in a surreal shadow world where the dosimeters (to measure radiation) provide the backbeat for a grayed-out version of life just this side of The Twilight Zone. Even more than Havana Bay, this novel demonstrates Cruz Smith's remarkable ability to meld character with landscape, and if Renko seems to find a shred of hope in the end, we know not to turn our dosimeters off quite yet. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
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 APRIL 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, Renko has survived, barely, the journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find his transformed nation just as obsessed with secrecy, corruption and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship. In Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko enters the privileged world of Russia's new billionaire class. The grandest of them all, a self-made powerhouse named Pasha Ivanov, has apparently leapt to his death from the palatial splendor of his ultra-modern Moscow condominium. While there are no signs pointing to homicide, there is one troubling and puzzling bit of evidence...in Ivanov's bedroom closet, there's a mountain of salt. Ivanov's demise ultimately leads Renko on a journey through Chernobyl's netherworld. The crimes he uncovers and the secrets they reveal about the New Russia, make for a tense, unforgettable adventure.
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