Description
ISBN: 0684872544
Title: Wolves Eat Dogs
Author: Smith, Martin Cruz
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, New York
Publication Date: 2004
Edition: SIGNED First Edition
Book Condition: F
D-j Condition: F
Synopsis: Cynical, quietly subversive, brilliantly analytical and haunted by melancholy, Arkady Renko is one of the iconic detectives of contemporary fiction. 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 his most baffling case yet, Renko enters the privileged world of Russia’s new billionaire class to investigate the apparent suicide of its grandest member.
Review: “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.
