Noting other reviewers here, I was surprised that many did not find this an engaging read. Confession time - my preferred method is audiobook, preferably while cooking- and on audio, this is an amazing journey. Retrospectively, Gorky Park (1993) was a bit too heavy on the KGB angle for me. Further, William Hurt's leaden transmission of the character on film, Joanna Pecula's implausibility and constrained acting coupled with attendant excess publicity and overselling made the whole mess horribly repellent. Further, at the time the movie aired, such a bleak portrayal of the grey Soviet state was no longer in keeping with current events-it was instantly dated. Havana Bay (1999) is more in keeping with Wolves Eat Dogs in terms of style, detail and background on Cuba, and the emotional resonance- and as such, it was a marvelous find on audio, wooing me back to Cruz Smith.

By way of comparison, a word on Polar Star, since some here seem to find it engaging- that book's plot is stark and unpopulated- easily divined and far less intricate. Those who can handle the complexity of a master story teller, read on. In Wolves Eat Dogs, Smith tangles together multiple threads of plot in a fascinating weave; the post-Chernobyl landscape is vivid and offers a near sci-fi experience wrapped inside a great detective story wrapped inside an adventure travel yarn. Where else can do you get all that, bundled along with sidelights of the Russian mafia, Perestroika excesses, homeless waifs- and Cruz Smith makes it all work.

I'm all for Renko's lack of emotional affect-have readers forgotten that he is a widower, sucked dry by the pain of his wife's senseless death? Besides, all experienced (good) investigators are emotionally remote. For those paying attention, Renko's pathos and omnipresent sense of humanity surface in an inferential way. His all-too perceptive questions and intuitive grasp of other characters betrays an emotional sensibility that is entirely tuned in. I liken his character to Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus, another fav of mine. Don't pass this one up if you can handle it.

I'm a big fan of Martin Cruz Smith's work. I've always been sympathetic to the plight of his serialised protagonist Arkady Renko, a wise, solemn, thinking-man's detective, who's knowledge and instincts run deeper with each page. In the novels after Gorky Park, Renko's investigations have taken him to a fishing boat in the Artic Circle and to Cuba. But no matter where he is, death always seems to find him; and he always knows what to do with it. In this book his case leads him to Chernobyl, some 20 years after the great accident/meltdown. Smith has always populated his books with plenty of interesting side characters that make up in personality what Renko lacks, and this one is no exception. The plot seems straight forward--a billionair New Russian jumps out a window. But of course nothing as it seems and everybody has a motive and yet nobody wants him to solve the case. There are plenty of roadblocks for Renko to negotiate and deadends for the reader to travel along. But this one just didn't engage me as much as the others and I don't know why. There are better books in the series, my two favorites being Polar Star and Havana Bay and I'd recommend those two before this one. However, that said, I still can't wait for the next Renko novel.

Although I read and enjoyed GORKY PARK a number of years ago, I confess up front to not being a particular fan of "spy thrillers" generally or Martin Cruz specifically. I simply purchased WOLVES EAT DOGS (at a bookstore in mainland China) as an airplane read for the 15-hour flight from Shanghai to Chicago. It served its purpose in what I can best call workmanlike fashion, helping pass the time but rarely grabbing my attention in the manner of great suspense novels.

In WOLVES EAT DOGS, Smith relies on his trusty war horse, the loner police detective Arkady Renko, to carry us through the mystery of a wealthy man's suicide and another's unsolved throat-slitting in the Zone of Exclusion, the radioactively hot district surrounding Chernobyl. The story opens with the death of fabulously wealthy industrialist Pasha Ivanov, an apparent suicide by jumping from the window of his high rise apartment. Inexplicably, Pasha is found on the street holding a salt shaker, and Arkady discovers a 50-pound mound of salt in Pasha's bedroom closet. The authorities are quick to write the death off as a suicide, but the irrepressibly dogged Renko cannot bring himself to let go. When Pasha's successor to the helm of the NoviRus conglomerate, Lev Timofeyev, turns up murdered near Chernobyl, Renko is dispatched and more or less exiled to that hell on Earth. Needless to say, the plodding and methodical detective forges ahead with his investigation and, with the help of a renegade American name Bobby Hoffman and the requisite doctor-eventually-turned-love-interest Eve Kazka, eventually solves the mystery. Unfortunately, the resolution is both murky and frustratingly anti-climactic, a paltry reward for slogging through the sometimes confusing twists and turns of a thriller that never thrills.

Throughout the story, Smith runs a subplot involving Renko's "Big Brother" relationship with a semi-autistic young orphan boy named Zhenya. A chess wizard and potentially a math genius, Zhenya connects with Renko through a series of methodical, repetitive outings that parallel Renko's own investigative methods. Their formal, emotionless relationship also mimics the detective's own arm's length style of interaction with most of the rest of the world. Zhenya's inability to speak or connect with others may perhaps also be taken as a symbol of life in post-Soviet Russia, where people have been cut loose from their cultural and historical moorings and left to fend for themselves in a free-wheeling and nearly lawless new world of capitalist free enterprise. By the end, however, the notion of Renko moving forward with an ad hoc family of damaged goods - himself emotionally damaged, Eve physically damaged by terminal illness, and the autistic Zhenya - seems more maudlin than therapeutic.

Without doubt, the most interesting aspect of WOLVES EAT DOGS is its seemingly realistic depiction of life in the Zone of Exclusion. The scenario is post-Apocalyptic, a nuclear dead zone without the blast destruction that could find a home in an updated version of Dante's Inferno. The characters who populate the Zone are straight out of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, mixed with a few Russian peasants borrowed from the shtetls of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. The combination is curiously effective, providing a chilling glimpse of life as it might appear following a muclear holocaust. The fact that these lost souls, doomed as they are to suffer painful radiation-related deaths, demonstrate more life and personality than Detective Renko, speaks volumes about Smith's tired, emotionally exhausted character. Even the affectless Zhenya shows more life and personality. While this may have been an intentional literary device, it too often makes reading WOLVES EAT DOGS about as exciting as reading a police detective's training manual. Imagine watching RAIN MAN without the Tom Cruise character, just following Dustin Hoffman around in his disattached daily affairs.

On

"Wolves Eat Dogs" is similar to earlier entries of the series following beleaguered and isolated Moscow detective Arkady "Arkhasha" Renko in that the immediate mystery is buried within a much larger one. In "Gorky Park", the murder and mutilation of a trio of sable smugglers parallels the disintegration of the Soviet state. In "Wolves", the suspicious suicide of a new-era Russian tycoon leads Renko to the black villages surrounding Chernobyl. Pasha Ivanov is the boss of NoviRus - it's a job with a respectable veneer that requires he act like a warlord and guard himself like a Machiavellian prince. Ivanov, who dipped into bouts of despair around May Day in a way ironic for a capitalist, threw himself out of his modern castle tower, leaving behind piles of what appeared to be salt. One of Ivanov's associates appears wasting away due to some unknown, almost Chekhovian illness - soon he will become one of Renko's newest cases. Renko, on the outs with his boss- the Moscow prosecutor - finds himself out on a limb. His only companion is Zhenya, a young and apparently brilliant boy who never speaks. Soon Renko's investigations will take him to the northern Ukraine, to the dead zone where time stopped for the Soviet Union in 1986. In searching for the truth Renko will confront backwater Militia, renegade environmentalists, squatters, unregenerate elderly Ukrainians who have nowhere to escape, die-hard Soviets and poachers. The larger mystery of how and why people live in a dead land soon threatens to swamp Renko's smaller (and soon unsanctioned) investigation.

It's always welcome to revisit stalwart investigator Renko who's record of detective work reads like pages of recent Russian history. Echoing "Red Square", the true mystery is not how and why people die or murder, but how and why people live. MCZ conjures up a Chernobyl that isn't so much dead but more alive than the humans who abandoned it. An ecologist theorizes that the accident actually saved the region - by driving away the millions of human beings who would have poisoned the land over a longer and irrevocable course.

So why isn't this entry a standout? Much of the story is rushed. MCZ normally finds a way to integrate his exotic surroundings into the intricacies of his story - but here the stories of Chernobyl & Ivanov never come together until forced by a confession in the final chapter. Even the jump from Moscow to Chernobyl seems forced. The book ends on a disappointingly pat conclusion. That said, "Wolves" preserves MCZ's gift for observation and inspired prose, and Renko himself is in top form. While not a great Renko novel, "Wolves" does go for your jugular and doesn't easily let go.

What I like about this book is that it knows its direction and leads the reader along through deception and noise, but never forgets the theatre of a good mystery: everything is a lead up to that final curtainrise and the AHA moments when killer and corpse are united in logical progression. Arkady Renko is a heck of a character, using the older Chandlerian jag of being too honest to have a clue about the world and thus getting in oodles and oodles of trouble. Yes, not so bad, that part -- the mystery is fairly transparent. As they say, the second dominant character not immediately related to the character's mission is usually the killer. Is it true? You apply all those filters and count, but all I can say is that once this gets going, to an experienced reader it's a process of getting closer to the truth by erasing smudges of lie. I liked this book, although it's no master work, and plan to read more celebrated vodka-and-spoiled-beets fiction from this author.