Wolves Eat Dogs [Hardcover]

The latest of Smith's thrillers about honest Russian cop Arkady Renko, Wolves Eat Dogs has a memorably spooky opening as Renko prowls the apartment of one of the men who has done well out of privatization and neo-capitalism and has suddenly jumped out of a tenth floor window. The dead man's cupboard is full of salt and he was clutching a salt-shaker when he died--no-one wants to investigate madness, but Renko suspects that there is more to it than that. When the dead man's partner turns up with his throat cut in a cemetery in the Ukraine, his bosses get him out of their hair by sending him to investigate--in the overgrown deserted towns and returning woodlands around the radioactive ruins of the Chernobyl power plant. A place full of deadly legacies and ruined hopes is just the sort of place where Renko feels at home, and where secrets are as common as giant mutant catfish. The mystery is less impressive here than the atmosphere--Smith gives the attentive reader more clues than merely playing fair demands--but with atmosphere so intense that hardly matters. --Roz Kaveney

'Wolves Eat Dogs is a solid reminder of just how good the Renko books are.’

‘It’s an astonishing portrait of an abandoned civilisation, a kind of poisoned Eden…the best thing he has done for years.’

‘The barren, brutalised landscape seems to have inspired Cruz Smith to new heights... quite exceptional.’

The author of Gorky Park brings us Renko’s most beguiling and unusual adventure to date.

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 . . . Pasha Ivanov, one of Russia's richest oligarchs, is lying dead on the pavement outside his luxury high-rise apartment in Moscow. His death, it seems, is a straightforward case of suicide. Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, however, has never been one to take evidence at face value and there’s something puzzling him that he simply refuses to ignore: a mountain of salt found in Ivanov’s wardrobe . . . Renko’s investigations take him to the notorious exclusion zone, the area around Chernobyl deserted and forgotten for almost two decades. "The Zone" is a place of mystery, danger – and sometimes - unimaginable beauty. When the body of Lev Timofeyev, Pasha Ivanov’s former research partner, is discovered in a contaminated cemetery, it is only the beginning of Renko’s journey into this labyrinthine netherworld of crime - and an investigation that is about to uncover some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.

Martin Cruz Smith is the author of Gorky Park, as well as Stallion Gate, Polar Star, Red Square, Rose and Havana Bay, among other novels. He lives in California with his wife and three children.