"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
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. 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


Review
The New York Times Martin Cruz Smith is a master of the international thriller.

Newsweek A true storyteller...Martin Cruz Smith is literate and exciting -- think Joseph Conrad on amphetamines.

Time Martin Cruz Smith and Detective Arkady Renko are irresistible.


Review
Rocky Mountain News Few thriller writers can transport the reader to a different place and time in every story and make the transition and atmospherics completely believable. Martin Cruz Smith is the master at it.


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 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 posh, 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 to Chernobyl and its environs. (No one knows how many deaths resulted from the explosion in Reactor Number 4. The official government figure is just 41, though many experts estimate that the toll was really a half million or more.) It is a ghostly world, still aglow with radioactivity, now inhabited only by the militia, shady scavengers, a few reckless scientists, and some elderly Ukrainian peasants who would rather ignore the Geiger counters than relocate. Renko's journey to this netherworld, the crimes he uncovers there and the secrets they reveal about the New Russia, make for a tense, unforgettable page-turning adventure. Each of Martin Cruz Smith's novels is a ticket to an unknown world. Wolves Eat Dogs is Smith's most harrowing trip yet.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 Moscow swam in color. Hazy floodlights of Red Square mixed with the neon of casinos in Revolution Square. Light wormed its way from the underground mall in the Manezh. Spotlights crowned new towers of glass and polished stone, each tower capped by a spire. Gilded domes still floated around the Garden Ring, but all night earthmovers tore at the old city and dug widening pools of light to raise a modern, vertical Moscow more like Houston or Dubai. It was a Moscow that Pasha Ivanov had helped to create, a shifting landscape of tectonic plates and lava flows and fatal missteps. Senior Investigator Arkady Renko leaned out a window the better to see Ivanov on the pavement ten floors below. Ivanov was dead but not particularly bloody, arms and legs at odd angles. Two black Mercedeses were at the curb, Ivanov's car and an SUV for his bodyguards. It sometimes seemed to Arkady that every successful businessman and Mafia hood in Moscow had been issued two Nazi-black Mercedeses. Ivanov had arrived at 9:28 p.m., gone directly up to the safest apartment in Moscow and at 9:48 p.m. plunged to the sidewalk. Arkady had measured Ivanov's distance from the building. Homicides generally hit close, having expended their energy in trying not to fall. Suicides were single-minded and landed farther out. Ivanov had almost reached the street. Behind Arkady, Prosecutor Zurin had brought drinks from the wet bar to a NoviRus senior vice president named Timofeyev and a young blonde in the living room. Zurin was as fussy as a ma�tre d'; he had survived six Kremlin regimes by recognizing his best customers and smoothing out their problems. Timofeyev had the shakes and the girl was drunk. Arkady thought the gathering was a little like a party where the host had suddenly and inexplicably dived through the window. After the shock the guests carried on. The odd man out was Bobby Hoffman, Ivanov's American assistant. Although he was worth millions of dollars, his loafers were split, his fingers were smudged with ink and his suede jacket was worn to a shine. Arkady wondered how much more time Hoffman had at NoviRus. An assistant to a dead man? That didn't sound promising. Hoffman joined Arkady at the window. "Why are there plastic bags around Pasha's hands?" "I was looking for signs of resistance, maybe cuts on the fingers." "Resistance? Like a fight?" Prosecutor Zurin rocked forward on the sofa. "There is no investigation. We do not investigate suicides. There are no signs of violence in the apartment. Ivanov came up alone. He left alone. That, my friends, is a suicide in spades." The girl lifted a dazed expression. Arkady had learned from the file he had on Pasha Ivanov that Rina Shevchenko was his personal interior designer, a twenty-year-old in a red leather pantsuit and high-heeled boots. Timofeyev was known as a robust sportsman, but he could have been his father, he had shrunk so much within his suit. "Suicides are a personal tragedy. It's enough to suffer the death of a friend. Colonel Ozhogin -- the head of NoviRus Security -- is already flying back." He added to Arkady, "Ozhogin wants nothing done until he arrives." Arkady said, "We don't leave a body on the sidewalk like a rug, even for the colonel." "Pay no attention to Investigator Renko," Zurin said. "He's the office fanatic. He's like a narcotics dog; he sniffs every bag." There won't be much left to sniff here, Arkady thought. Just out of curiosity, he wondered if he could protect the bloody prints on the windowsill. Timofeyev pressed a handkerchief against his nose. Arkady saw spots of red. "Nosebleed?" asked Zurin. "Summer cold," said Timofeyev. Opposite Ivanov's apartment was a dark office building. A man walked out of the lobby, waved to Arkady and gave a thumbs-down. "One of your men?" Hoffman asked. "A detective, in case someone over there was working late and might have witnessed something." "But you're not investigating." "I do whatever the prosecutor says." "So you think it was suicide." "We prefer suicides. Suicides don't demand work or drive up the crime rate." It also occurred to Arkady that suicides didn't expose the incompetence of investigators and militia who were better at sorting out dead drunks from the living than solving murders committed with any amount of forethought. Zurin said, "You will excuse Renko, he thinks all of Moscow is a crime scene. The problem is that the press will sensationalize the death of someone as eminent as Pasha Ivanov." In which case, better the suicide of an unbalanced financier than assassination, Arkady thought. Timofeyev might lament the suicide of his friend, but a murder investigation could place the entire NoviRus company under a cloud, especially from the perspective of foreign partners and investors who already felt that doing business in Russia was a dip in murky water. Since Zurin had ordered Arkady's financial investigation of Ivanov, this U-turn had to be executed with dispatch. So, not a ma�tre d', Arkady thought, but more a skillful sailor who knew when to tack. "Who had access to this apartment?" Arkady asked. "Pasha was the only one allowed on this level. The security was the best in the world," Zurin said. "Best in the world," Timofeyev agreed. Zurin said, "The entire building is covered by surveillance cameras, inside and out, with monitors that are watched not only at the reception desk here but, as a safeguard, also by technicians at the headquarters of NoviRus Security. The other apartments have keys. Ivanov had a keypad with a code known only to him. He also had a lock-out button by the elevator, to keep out the world when he was in. He had all the security a man could wish for." Arkady had been in the lobby and seen the monitors tucked into a round rosewood desk. Each small screen was split in four. The receptionist also had a white phone with two outside lines and a red phone with a line direct to NoviRus. "The building staff doesn't have Ivanov's code?" Arkady asked. "No. Only the central office at NoviRus." "Who had access to the code there?" "No one. It was sealed, until tonight." According to the prosecutor, Ivanov had ordered that no one enter the apartment but him -- not staff, not a housecleaner, not a plumber. Anyone who tried would appear on monitors and on tape, and the staff had seen nothing. Ivanov did his own cleaning. Gave the elevator man the trash, laundry, dry cleaning, lists for food or whatever, which would be waiting in the lobby when Ivanov returned. Zurin made it sound like many talents. "Eccentric," Arkady said. "He could afford to be eccentric. Churchill wandered around his castle naked." "Pasha wasn't crazy," Rina said. "What was he?" Arkady rephrased the question. "How would you describe him?" "He had lost weight. He said he had an infection. Maybe he had a bad reaction to medication." Timofeyev said, "I wish Ozhogin were here." Arkady had seen a glossy magazine cover with a confident Lev Timofeyev sailing a yacht in the Black Sea, carving through the waves. Where was that Timofeyev? Arkady wondered. An ambulance rolled discreetly to the curb. The detective crossed the street with a camera and shot flash pictures of Ivanov being rolled into the body bag and of the stain on the pavement. Something had been concealed under Ivanov's body. From Arkady's distance it looked like a drinking glass. The detective took a picture of that, too. Hoffman watched Arkady as much as the scene below. "Is it true, you treat Moscow like a crime scene?" "Force of habit." The living room would have been a forensic technician's dream: white leather sofa and chairs, limestone floor and linen walls, glass ashtray and coffee table, all excellent backgrounds for hair, lipstick, fingerprints, the scuff marks of life. It would have been easy to dust and search before Zurin genially invited in a crowd and tainted the goods. Because with a jumper, there were two questions: was he alone, and was he pushed? Timofeyev said to no one in particular, "Pasha and I go far back. We studied and did research together at the institute when the country suffered its economic collapse. Imagine, the greatest physics laboratory in Moscow, and we worked without pay. The director, Academician Gerasimov, turned off the heat in the buildings to save money, and of course, it was winter and the pipes froze. We had a thousand liters of radioactive water to discharge, so we sent it into the river in the center of the city." He drained his glass. "The director was a brilliant man, but you would sometimes find him inside a bottle. On those occasions he relied on Pasha and me. Anyway, we dumped radioactive water in the middle of Moscow, and no one knew." Arkady was taken aback. He certainly hadn't known. Rina took Timofeyev's glass to the bar, where she paused by a gallery of photographs in which Pasha Ivanov was not dead. Ivanov was not a handsome individual, but a big man full of grand gestures. In different pictures he rappelled off cliffs, trekked the Urals, kayaked through white water. He embraced Yeltsin and Clinton and the senior Bush. He beamed at Putin, who, as usual, seemed to suck on a sour tooth. He cradled a miniature dachshund like a baby. Ivanov partied with opera tenors and rock stars, and even when he bowed to the Orthodox patriarch, a brash confidence shone through. Other New Russians fell by the wayside: shot, bankrupted or exiled by the state. Pasha not only flourished, he was known as a public-spirited man, and when construction funds for the Church of the Redeemer ran low, Ivanov provided the gold foil for the dome. When Arkady first opened a file on Ivanov, he was told that if Ivanov was charged with breaking the law, he could call the senate on his mobile phone and have the law rewritten. Trying to indict Ivanov was like trying to hold on to a snake that kept shedding skin after skin and grew legs in the meantime. In other words, Pasha Ivanov was both a man of his time and a stage in evolution. Arkady noticed a barely perceptible glitter on the windowsill, scattered grains of crystals so familiar he could not resist pressing his forefinger to pick them up and taste them. Salt. "I'm going to look around," he said. "But you're not investigating," Hoffman said. "Absolutely not." "A word alone," Zurin said. He led Arkady into the hall. "Renko, we had an investigation into Ivanov and NoviRus, but a case against a suicide doesn't smell good in anybody's nostrils." "You initiated the investigation." "And I'm ending it. The last thing I want is for people to get the idea that we hounded Pasha Ivanov to death, and still went after him even when he was in the grave. It makes us look vindictive, like fanatics, which we aren't." The prosecutor searched Arkady's eyes. "When you've had your little look around here, go to your office and collect all the Ivanov and NoviRus files and leave them by my office. Do it tonight. And stop using the phrase 'New Russian' when you refer to crime. We're all New Russians, aren't we?" "I'm trying." Ivanov's apartment took up the entire tenth floor. There weren't many rooms, but they were spacious and commanded a wraparound view of the city that gave the illusion of walking on air. Arkady began at a bedroom upholstered in linen wall panels, laid with a Persian rug. The photographs here were more personal: Ivanov skiing with Rina, sailing with Rina, in scuba-diving gear with Rina. She had huge eyes and a Slavic shelf of cheekbones. In each picture a breeze lifted her golden hair; she was the kind who could summon a breeze. Considering their difference in ages, for Ivanov their relationship must have been a bit like making a mistress of a leggy girl, a Lolita. That was who she reminded Arkady of -- Lolita was a Russian creation, after all! There was a nearly paternal humor in Pasha's expression and a candy-sweet flavor to Rina's smile. A rosy nude, a Modigliani, hung on the wall. On the night table were an ashtray of Lalique glass and a Hermès alarm clock; in the drawer was a 9mm pistol, a Viking with a fat clip of seventeen rounds, but not a whiff of ever having been fired. An attaché case on the bed held a single Bally shoe sack and a mobile-phone charger cord. On the bookshelf was a decorator's selection of worn leather-bound collections of Pushkin, Rilke and Chekhov, and a box that held a trio of Patek, Cartier and Rolex watches and gently agitated them to keep them running, a definite necessity for the dead. The only off note was dirty laundry piled in a corner. He moved into a bathroom with a limestone floor, gold-plated fixtures on a step-in spa, heated bars for robes large enough for polar bears and the convenience of a toilet phone. A shaving mirror magnified the lines of Arkady's face. A medicine cabinet held -- besides the usual toiletries -- bottles of Viagra, sleeping pills, Prozac. Arkady noted a Dr. Novotny's name on each prescription. He didn't see any antibiotics for infection. The kitchen looked both new and forgotten, with gleaming steel appliances, enameled pots without a single smudge and burners with not one spot of crusted sauce. A silvery rack held dusty, expensive wines, no doubt selected by an expert. Yet the dishwasher was stacked with unwashed dishes, just as the bed had been loosely made and the bathroom towels hung awry, the signs of a man caring for himself. A restaurant-size refrigerator was a cold vault, empty except for bottles of mineral water, odds and ends of cheese, crackers and half a loaf of sliced bread. Vodka sat in the freezer. Pasha was a busy man, off to business dinners every day. He was, until recently, a famously sociable man, not a wealthy recluse with long hair and fingernails. He would have wanted to show his friends a shining up-to-date kitchen and offer them a decent Bordeaux or a chilled shot of vodka. Yet he hadn't shown anyone anything, not for months. In the dining room Arkady laid his cheek on the rosewood table and looked down its length. Dusty, but not a scratch. At the twist of a rheostat, the next room turned into a home theater with a flat screen a good two meters wide, speakers in matte black and eight swivel chairs in red velvet with individual gooseneck lamps. All New Russians had home theaters, as if they were auteurs on the side. Arkady flipped through a video library ranging from Eisenstein to Jackie Chan. There was no tape in the tape player, and nothing in the mini-fridge but splits of Moët. An exercise room had floor-to-ceiling windows, a padded floor, free weights and an exercise machine that looked like a catapult. A television hung over a stationary bike. The prize was Ivanov's apartment office, a futuristic cockpit of glass and stainless steel. Everything was close at hand, a monitor and printer on the desk, and a computer stack with a CD tray open beneath, next to an empty wastebasket. On a table lay copies of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, folded as neatly as pressed sheets. CNN was on the monitor screen, market quotes streaming under a man who muttered half a world away. Arkady suspected the subdued sound was the sign of a lonely man, the need for another voice in the apartment, even while he banned his lover and nearest associates. It also struck Arkady that this was the closest anyone in the prosecutor's office had ever come to penetrating NoviRus. It was a shame that the man to do so was him. Arkady's life had come to this: his highest skill lay in ferreting out which man had bludgeoned another. The subtleties of corporate theft were new to him, and he stood in front of the screen like an ape encountering fire. Virtually within reach might be the answers he had been searching for: the names of silent partners in the ministries who promoted and protected Ivanov and their account numbers in offshore banks. He wouldn't find car trunks stuffed with dollar bills. It didn't work that way anymore. There was no paper. Money flew through the air and was gone. Victor, the detective from the street, finally made it up. He was a sleep-deprived man in a sweater that reeked of cigarettes. He held up a sandwich bag containing a saltshaker. "This was on the pavement under Ivanov. Maybe it was there already. Why would anyone jump out a window with a saltshaker?" Bobby Hoffman squeezed by Victor. "Renko, the best hackers in the world are Russian. I've encrypted and programmed Pasha's hard drive to self-destruct at the first sign of a breach. In other words, don't touch a fucking thing." "You were Pasha's computer wizard as well as a business adviser?" Arkady said. "I did what Pasha asked." Arkady tapped the CD tray. It slid open, revealing a silvery disk. Hoffman tapped the tray and it slid shut. He said, "I should also tell you that the computer and any disks are NoviRus property. You are a millimeter from trespassing. You ought to know the laws here." "Mr. Hoffman, don't tell me about Russian law. You were a thief in New York, and you're a thief here." "No, I'm a consultant. I'm the guy who told Pasha not to worry about you. You have an advanced degree in business?" "No." "Law?" "No." "Accounting?" "No." "Then lots of luck. The Americans came after me with a staff of eager-beaver lawyers right out of Harvard. I can see Pasha had a lot to be afraid of." This was more the hostile attitude that Arkady had expected, but Hoffman ran out of steam. "Why don't you think it's suicide? What's wrong?" "I didn't say that anything was." "Something bothers you." Arkady considered. "Recently your friend wasn't the Pasha Ivanov of old, was he?" "That could have been depression." "He moved twice in the last three months. Depressed people don't have the energy to move; they sit still." Depression happened to be a subject that Arkady knew something about. "It sounds like fear to me." "Fear of what?" "You were close to him, you'd know better than I. Does anything here seem out of place?" "I wouldn't know. Pasha wouldn't let us in here. Rina and I haven't been inside this apartment for a month. If you were investigating, what would you be looking for?" "I have no idea." Victor felt at the sleeve of Hoffman's jacket. "Nice suede. Must have cost a fortune." "It was Pasha's. I admired it once when he was wearing it, and he forced it on me. It wasn't as if he didn't have plenty more, but he was generous." "How many more jackets?" Arkady asked. "Twenty, at least." "And suits and shoes and tennis whites?" "Of course." "I saw clothes in the corner of the bedroom. I didn't see a closet." "I'll show you," Rina said. How long she had been standing behind Victor, Arkady didn't know. "I designed this apartment, you know." "It's a very nice apartment," Arkady said. Rina studied him for signs of condescension, before she turned and, unsteadily, hand against the wall, led the way to Ivanov's bedroom. Arkady saw nothing different until Rina pushed a wall panel that clicked and swung open to a walk-in closet bathed in lights. Suits hung on the left, pants and jackets on the right, some new and still in store bags with elaborate Italian names. Ties hung on a brass carousel. Built-in bureaus held shirts, underclothes and racks for shoes. The clothes ranged from plush cashmere to casual linen, and everything in the closet was immaculate, except a tall dressing mirror that was cracked but intact, and a bed of sparkling crystals that covered the floor. Prosecutor Zurin arrived. "What is it now?" Arkady licked a finger to pick up a grain and put it to his tongue. "Salt. Table salt." At least fifty kilos' worth of salt had been poured on the floor. The bed was softly rounded, dimpled with two faint impressions. "A sign of derangement," Zurin announced. "There's no sane explanation for this. It's the work of a man in suicidal despair. Anything else, Renko?" "There was salt on the windowsill." "More salt? Poor man. God knows what was going through his mind." "What do you think?" Hoffman asked Arkady. "Suicide," Timofeyev said from the hall, his voice muffled by his handkerchief. Victor spoke up. "As long as Ivanov is dead. My mother put all her money in one of his funds. He promised a hundred percent profit in a hundred days. She lost everything, and he was voted New Russian of the Year. If he was here now and alive, I would strangle him with his own steaming guts." That would settle the issue, Arkady thought. By the time Arkady had delivered a hand truck of NoviRus files to the prosecutor's office and driven home, it was two in the morning. His apartment was not a glass tower shimmering on the skyline but a pile of rocks off the Garden Ring. Various Soviet architects seemed to have worked with blinders on to design a building with flying buttresses, Roman columns and Moorish windows. Sections of the facade had fallen off, and parts had been colonized by grasses and saplings sowed by the wind, but inside, the apartments offered high ceilings and casement windows. Arkady's view was not of sleek Mercedeses gliding by but of a backyard row of metal garages, each secured by a padlock covered by the cutoff bottom of a plastic soda bottle. No matter the hour, Mr. and Mrs. Rajapakse, his neighbors from across the hall, came over with biscuits, hard-boiled eggs and tea. They were university professors from Sri Lanka, a small, dark pair with delicate manners. "It is no bother," Rajapakse said. "You are our best friend in Moscow. You know what Gandhi said when he was asked about Western civilization? He said he thought it would be a good idea. You are the one civilized Russian we know. Because we know you do not take care of yourself, we must do it for you." Mrs. Rajapakse wore a sari. She flew around the apartment like a butterfly to catch a fly and put it out the window. "She harms nothing," her husband said. "The violence here in Moscow is very bad. She worries about you all the time. She is like a little mother to you." After Arkady chased them home, he had half a glass of vodka and toasted. To a New Russian. He was trying. Copyright © 2004 by Titanic Productions

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Mahler - The New York Times

Arkady fits right in among the people of Chernobyl and the other ''black villages'' that make up the Zone of Exclusion. Old farmers, humanitarian aid workers, even the local hustlers -- they're all survivors, stubborn, stoic, cynical and yet vulnerable in equal measure. The battered but tireless Arkady, who has endured a brutal father, the loss of the woman he loved, at least one suicide attempt, a psychiatric hospitalization and much more, can relate.

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 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Smith's first Arkady Renko novel, Gorky Park, became a best seller because it offered American readers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a world closed off to them. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, it would seem that Smith had nothing left to write about. But as he proved with Red Square and Havana Bay, the new Russia offers a rich source of material (and crimes). This time cynical but honest senior investigator Renko must determine whether the defenestration death of a Russian tycoon was suicide or murder. The discovery of radioactive salt in the dead man's apartment leads Renko to the abandoned Ukrainian towns of Chernobyl and Pripyat, still dangerously contaminated 18 years after the world's deadliest nuclear accident. There he finds a ghostly world inhabited by scavengers, elderly villagers, and a small group of Russian militia and scientists. As Renko pursues his investigation, he uncovers a greater crime, the sad legacy of Soviet ineptitude and corruption. Smith's latest is filled with the same eye for detail and fully developed characters that made Gorky Park so compelling. Fans will snap up. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/04.]-Wilda Williams, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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

Kirkus Reviews