Wolves Eat Dogs

There is something so calming and pleasurable when reading Renko novels. I think it is a combination of the author's style of writing and the phlegmatic nature of Arkady Renko himself. I started this book a few nights ago after finishing a very so-so novel. When I cracked this book and started reading, the first four lines hit me like a Mack truck. The writing was so beautiful and compelling I was mesmerized. The difference between what I had been drudging through before, and this work of art, couldn't have been more brutally stark. Martin Cruz Smith is a master of his trade, a genius, and you can tell from the very first sentence. I loved this book; it was very rewarding on so many levels. First there is Arkady himself. What a wonderful protagonist and how mastefully created! There are no heavy-handed characterizations in a Smith novel. We learn who Arkady is by listening to his thoughts, seeing him interact with others, and observing how he deals with situations. Do we know what he looks like? No. Is he big or little? Muscular or fat? No idea. Does it matter? Not a bit. That is the best writing, when the author does not insult you with heavy-handed descriptions he simply tells a story and you learn to identify with his characters by their actions. Arkady is a wonderful character, deeply sympathetic, and I love following him around and watching him doggedly and calmly work a case despite the abuse, unfairness, corruption, indifference, maliciousness, and spite of those he must deal with to do so. The man takes beatings physically, mentally, and psychically with stoicness and calm and then he just gets up and keeps going. Partly Russian fatalism, partly his own nature, Arkady is a normal person who just keeps going where nearly everyone else would give up, yet there is no ego in it. It's just Arkady. In this book Arkady must determine why a billionaire jumped to his death with a salt shaker. Was it suicide? Or something more sinister? And what's up with the salt shaker? And the pile of salt in the closet? This mystery was baffling to me (and Arkady for awhile) but the answers when they come are rewarding. It's a great mystery. Arkady must follow the case ultimately to Chernobyl and the descriptions and history and culture of the place and event are fascinating. In fact, the depictions of Chernobyl, the background you get, the people you meet there, what you learn of what it's like there right now will just amaze you. This book has it all; wonderful writing, one of literature's great characters, a great mystery, a worthwhile setting, great plot, and superbly done characters. Get this book, read it, and enjoy yourself! This one is a winner.

Another reviewer has remarked that "Wolves Eat Dogs" is set in "the radioactive wasteland around Chernobyl," a "grim circle of hell straight out of Dante's Inferno." Yes, and there is also in this novel the magical and strange mood of dark folklore and myth. Arkady, the mordant knight-errant, travels in the land of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folklore. In the radioactive rubble, an old man and his wife, a woman with steel teeth, tend an unruly cow, fishermen pull mutant catfish from a "cooling pond," and stuffed bears and dolls are the only occupants of broken houses in the black villages. The innocent child of the Baba Yaga tale finds salvation through kind acts. In Smith's allegory it is hard to find innocence, but kind acts indeed happen. A corrupt American businessman and an ancient Jewish hit man, "a black angel," flee the Zone to escape the police, but on their way out stop to don yarmulkes and shawls and chant the Kaddish over and over again near the "black hole" of the Chernobyl power station. Arkady thinks they are too late, but the old hit man nods as if to say they are fine. Another character, Eva, is almost a parody of her ancient and innocent sister, Eve. She is a woman made infertile by the surgeons who have cut out tumors caused by her exposure to radioactivity. She is bitterly damaged, but still she selflessly submits to rape in an attempt to bargain for Arkady's life. Like the bumpkin knight Parsifal, Arkady first fails to "get it." He misunderstands Eva's sacrifice and turns his back on her when she needs him most. He tries to avoid a silent child, an orphan, who can't express his need for Arkady's love. Arkady unravels the murder mystery that started him on his quest, but doesn't understand the possibility of his own redemption until near the end. In the airport in Kiev, back in the "real world" occupied by families and children, Arkady has a chance encounter with a mobster on the lam. There is a decision to make. Arrest him or not? Read the novel. Perhaps cynical Arkady, the world-weary cop, is ironically the most innocent of all the characters. Like a character in a story by Hawthorne, he must learn to join the brotherhood of sinners. This isn't just another detective novel. This is a literate novel rich in characterizations, imagery, and theme. Who cares who dunnit?

Arkady Renko is a pessimist; he thinks everything will go wrong. Arkady Renko is a realist; he believes everything will go wrong. Arkady Renko is a Russian; he knows everything will go wrong. Way back in "Gorky Park", the first of Martin Cruz Smith's tales about the Moscow investigator, Arkady Renko was faced with crime and corruption hidden behind the mask of Soviet communism. In this latest novel, the Soviet Union is no more, but crime and corruption remain -- indeed, they are blossoming -- under the rabid capitalism of the New Russia. In "Wolves Eat Dogs" Renko investigates (well, he is offically ordered not to investigate) the death of Moscow's darling billionaire-of-the-moment, Pasha Ivanov, who threw himself, maybe, out of the window of his luxurious high-rise apartment, leaving behind anxious business partners, a young mistress, and a pile of salt in his closet. Succeeding events lead Renko to "the Zone", the radioactive wasteland around Chernobyl in the Ukraine, a journey to a grim circle of hell straight out of Dante's Inferno, inhabited by the mad, the doomed, and the hopeless. Who else would eat food grown in radioactive earth and turn off dosimeters because their constant clicking is too distracting? Life there is very cheap, and death can be had at virtually no price at all. Yet, beneath all else, "Wolves Eat Dogs" is more than anything a story of redemption, never certain redemption but, ultimately, the undying possibility of redemption. Renko's descent to this nightmare of a real world makes for strongly compelling reading, arguably the best of the Renko books since "Gorky Park".

I have read and enjoyed Smith's previous Renko novels. Renko's erratic career path as a police inspector has seen him survive, barely, the apparatchiks of the Soviet regime (Gorky Park). He has survived its imminent demise (Polar Star) and the emergence of bloody cowboy capitalism (Red Square). Now, in Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko must operate in a Russia dominated by an elite group of billionaire oligarchs. The primary setting of Wolves Eats Dogs is the 30-kilometer evacuation (or exclusion) zone in the northern Ukraine, just south of Ukraine's border with Belarus, surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. On April 26th, 1986 the number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded after a planned test shutdown went seriously wrong. The subsequent release of radioactive material (cesium and strontium) is estimated to have reached levels exceeding 40 times the amount of radioactivity released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The short and long term effects of this explosion, particularly on the Republics of Belarus and Ukraine has been devastating. For example, the phrase "Chernobyl Necklace" refers to the ubiquitous ear-to-ear scar worn by Byelorussians and Ukrainians that have had thyroid cancer surgery. The thyroid cancer rate is estimated to be up to 2000 times greater in Belarus than in the general world population. Smith's eye for details makes note of these scars. The Chernobyl disaster has special resonance for me as I have spent five years involved with a Children of Chernobyl program that brings children from Belarus to the United States for six week health and respite visits. The dark world that Martin Cruz Smith portrays in Wolves Eat Dogs tracks remarkably well with accounts I have heard from Byelorussians and Ukrainians about life after Chernobyl. Smith made numerous trips to the exclusion zone and his investment in time and first-hand research bears fruit. It is into that dark world that fate and police work brings Inspector Arkday Renko. A billionaire oligarch, Pasha Ivanov, is found dead outside his high-rise Moscow flat. All evidence leads to the conclusion that Ivanov has taken his own life by jumping from his penthouse apartment. Renko is not so sure and decides to conduct his investigation despite the clear displeasure this evinces up and down the police ladder and amongst the surviving owners of Ivanov's company. In this, Renko's stubborn, principled independence has not changed at all since he first came to view in Gorky Park. When a second related death occurs in the 30-kilometer exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl, Renko's superiors are pleased to pack him off to investigate the death in the Ukraine. The majority of the action takes place in the exclusion zone. Renko plods on despite himself and despite attempts by virtually everyone to leave things alone. It is impossible to say more without revealing too much of the plot. However, it seems to be that in Wolves Eat Dogs we h

Martin Cruz Smith's Russian detective Arcady Renko began his career discovering bodies in Soviet Gorky Park, went on the lam on the Soviet fishing trawler Polar Star, came back to the force to follow a crime to Havana Bay, and now, he takes on the New Russia, where different wolves eat dogs. Pasha Ivanko is one of those wolves who made the transition from communism to the free market with brazen success, but now he lies smashed on the pavement in front of his luxury apartment building with nothing but a salt shaker to break his fall. In fact, when called to investigate, Arkady finds salt scattered throughout Ivanko's designer digs. His superiors tell him to write it off as a suicide, but somehow he can't. Why would someone who had embraced the new order as gleefully as Pasha kill himself, and what is it with this salt? The murder of Pasha's business partner in neighboring Ukraine earns Arkady a trip to Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion with its eerie abandoned city still shimmering with radioactivity. The number of people who died in the 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl is not known, nor is it known how many will die in the decades to come. The Zone of Exclusion is supposed to be completely de-populated except for scientists who are rotated in and out. Arkady discovers that the Zone is in fact quite a busy place with a variety of scavengers, entrepreneurs, elderly farm folk and fearless radioactive wild animals calling the place home. Smith loves to put the ironic but big-hearted Renko in surreal environments and this one is certainly one of the weirdest. Solving murders is one thing, but solving them while keeping one eye on radioactive warning signs is really something else. And just in case we've forgotten, the legacy of Chernobyl continues to spread in the form of radioactive bits and pieces scavenged from Chernobyl and sold across the world. The plot is taut and the writing is sharp. In his other Renko novels, Smith worked to shave away Russia's layers of artiface until we could see what really lay below. With such rich material as post-communist Russia, it's a shame that "Wolves Eat Dogs" is a little short in that department, but still, book does not disappoint. With this harrowing tale, Martin Cruz Smith continues to be one of the most accomplished and compelling mystery writers working today.