Wolves Eat Dogs by
Martin Cruz Smith
hbk out March 05
Published by Macmillan
at £17.99
Martin Cruz Smith wastes no time. Ten lines into his new novel and already Arkady Renko is
checking on a body that has crashed from a luxury high-rise apartment in Moscow to the pavement
below. Prosecutor Zurin deems it suicide, for suicides "don't demand work or drive up the crime
rate." At first Renka appears to agree. Suicides, he notes, hit the pavement further out than homicides,
who expend their last energies "trying not to fall" - and this one has "almost reached the street". The
corpse is Pasha lvanov, an ex-physicist and one of the new breed of top Russian tycoons with shady
associates and even shadier backgrounds. And one of those shady associates is sufficiently jumpy over
the remote possibility of homicide to buy Renko some time on the investigation...
The last time Cruz Smith let Renko loose on his Moscow home turf was in Red Square, back in
1992 - and the Soviet Union was on the point of collapse. Now the New Russia reaches for the skies
"like Houston or Dubai" and its tycoons come with 24-hour security and their own personal interior
designers. But Renko remains as sceptical of the new as he was of the old and occupies his spare time
with Zhenya, a traumatised and uncommunicative orphan, taking him an trips, for example, to Gorky
Park, the site of Renko's own greatest triumph. Not that Moscow remains Renko's home turf for long.
Pushing his enquiries one step too far, and discovering a vital clue in the process, he finds himself
exiled to the Ukraine, near Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident. His task is to
find the link between the death of Pasha Ivanov and that of Lev Timofeyev, Ivanov's friend and
colleague, whose body has been found in the Zone, the radioactive area around the defunct reactors.
Here this already compelling novel moves onto another level. Cruz Smith's depiction of the Zone
and its people is hallucinatory: an entire city and its surrounding countryside, apartment blocks,
schools, playgrounds abandoned (too late) and now populated by squatters, criminals looting the
"black" villages, teeming wild life revelling in the fact that the accident has created "the best
wild-animal refuge in Europe", along with returning elderly ex-inhabitants whose most earnest wish is
to die in the place of their birth. There is also the local militia and a group of scientists studying the
area. All this could have so easily capsized the book, but Cruz Smith keeps on course not only to
deliver a satisfactory conclusion to his major plot, but a hauntingly ambiguous one for Renko
personally.
Probably the most widely reviewed and recommended crime novel published so far this
year. Can you bear to wait until the Pan paperback, out in October?
Wolves Eat Dogs by
Martin Cruz Smith
