Grand Master at the Top of His Game

TITLE: Wolves Eat Dogs
AUTHOR: Martin Cruz Smith
PUBLISHER: Pocket

RATING
5/5 "Maria Sharapova"; 4/5 "Pavel Chekov"; 3/5 "Dolph Lundgren"; 2/5 "Rasputin"; 1/5 "Ivan the Terrible"
SCORE: 5/5

On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, outspoken critic of the Russian regime and former KGB officer, drank a cup of tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London. Floating in his cup was the subatomic version of a pipe bomb packed with ball bearings--an estimated 10 micrograms (the size of an ambitious speck of dust) of polonium 210, a radioactive substance over 250,000 times more toxic than cyanide. In three weeks Mr Litvinenko was dead, almost certainly poisoned by another former KGB man who shared Mr Litvinenko's table at the Pine Bar.

All this is a true story. And truth, so the saying goes, is stranger than fiction--unless, of course, fiction has already anticipated truth by a good two years. It's a testament to Martin Cruz Smith's insight into the way modern Russia functions (or more precisely, the way it doesn't) that his 2004 novel Wolves Eat Dog is almost eerily prescient in anticipating many of these events.

Wolves Eat Dogs is the fifth book in the series of novels featuring Russian police investigator Arkady Renko. From the start with 1981's Gorky Park, the Renko books have been as much about the cancers eating away at Russian society as they have been about the cynical, saturnine investigator. The conceit of having a thriller set on the metallic side of the iron curtain could have died with the cold war, but Mr Smith has kept the series fresh by bombarding his hero with events that mirror Russia's own deterioration through the past two decades. There are the Soviet era novels (Gorky Park and Polar Star); the Yeltsin revolution one (Red Square); the fall of the Communist bloc one (Havana Bay).

Wolves Eat Dogs is the corporate oligarch one, and starts with Pasha Ivanov, one of Russia's newly-minted billionaires, leaving an indelible impression on the Moscow pavement after reaching it rather directly and messily from his high-rise apartment balcony. A wolf like Ivanov makes enemies on his scrabble to the top of the pack, and Renko suspects something other than personal demons was eating away at the man. There is, for example, the question of why Ivanov had a mountain of salt in his closet. Renko's persistent probing irritates his superior, prosecutor Zurin, who would rather get back to the business of being bribed by Ivanov's successors. When Ivanov's business partner also turns up as a corpse near Chernobyl, Zurin seizes the opportunity to rid himself of his subordinate and dispatches Renko to investigate.

The remainder of the book largely takes place in the Exclusion Zone, a 30km no-go area surrounding the ruins of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Radiation from an explosion at the plant's reactor number four on April 26, 1986--by far the worst nuclear disaster in human history--killed about 50 plant workers and firemen in a matter of days, and released a cloud of toxic dust that continues to make the region uninhabitable 20 years later. Mr Smith's books draw power from the setting more than the plot, and with the Exclusion Zone he has tapped a source of skin-tingling unease and slow-motion dread. How odd that we have such an atavistic fear of such a twentieth-century invention. Yet there is no denying the menace felt in Mr Smith's description of the concrete sarcophagus entombing the remains of reactor number four, like a band-aid over a hole in the universe.

It's an environment that brings out some of the best in Mr Smith's writing since Gorky Park. Mr Smith's talent lies not only in his acute observations of Russia and its environment, but also in his mastery of the gallows humor this setting produces. Wolves Eat Dogs is easily one of the funniest books you will never laugh at.

A few minor quibbles. Readers of other Renko books will see familiar patterns developing. His ongoing feud with his superiors is wearing thin--surely the man would have been transferred, demoted, or just plain, old-fashioned shot by now. The central mystery isn't much of one, and the reader is left with more of a howdunit than a whodunit--and even then, is given no clues to go back and shake your head at the author's craft. The endings, too, have become slightly formulaic, and one simply waits for Renko to be rescued from Certain Death at the last minute.

Ah, but these are minor quibbles indeed. Who killed Ivanov? Who cares! In Mr Smith's hands, Renko's search is not about the journey, nor even the ending, but rather how one faces it.