Wolves Eat Dogs
First edition
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| Author | Martin Cruz Smith |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Arkady Renko # 5 |
| Genre | Crime novel |
| Published | 2004 |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster, Macmillan |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 352pp (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 55981782 |
| 813/.54 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3569.M5377 W65 2004 |
| Preceded by | Havana Bay |
| Followed by | Stalin's Ghost |
Wolves Eat Dogs is a crime novel by Martin Cruz Smith, set in Russia and Ukraine in the year 2004. It is the fifth novel to feature Investigator Arkady Renko and the first one taking place in Russia during the new, independent (post-Soviet) era.
Russia has changed from a Communist to capitalist state, and Ukraine has seceded from the former Soviet Union. When Pavel "Pasha" Ivanov, one of the leading members of Russia's new billionaire class, dies in an apparent suicide, Renko investigates. Pasha fell from the balcony of his penthouse apartment, and all the signs point to his having been alone at the time. The only anomaly is a large mound of table salt in the victim's wardrobe.
Despite interference from his own boss as well as from other persons of power, Renko continues his investigation by questioning Pasha's friends and associates. There is apparently some kind of dark secret in Ivanov's past, and Pasha was always very depressed around May Day. Just before he is forcefully removed from the investigation, Arkady returns alone to Pasha's apartment and reconstructs his movements on the night he died. In the drawer of his bureau, Arkady finds a radiation dosimeter wrapped in a blood-stained handkerchief. Turning it on, he finds that the entire apartment is radioactive, the highest levels coming from the mound of salt. Arkady concludes that Ivanov did indeed commit suicide but that it was under a form of duress. A HazMat team re-examines the apartment and Pasha's body and finds that the salt was mixed with a small quantity of cesium chloride, identical in appearance to table salt but lethally radioactive. After confirming that his apartment was filled with radiation, Ivanov swallowed a large quantity of the salt before jumping, in an attempt to protect anyone entering the apartment later.
A week after Arkady's discovery, Pasha's business partner Timofeyev is found brutally murdered near Pripyat, Ukraine, in the "dead zone" around the site of the Chernobyl disaster. Arkady's superior, exasperated at his insubordination, posts him to Ukraine to "investigate" this murder with neither assistance nor resources. He makes the acquaintance of the colorful local community: a team of radiobiologists, various foreign scientists, and a small group of peasant squatters who refuse to leave the area despite the official evacuation. Arkady also becomes the lover of Eva Kazka, a medical doctor assigned to the scientific community. Eva confides to him that she was rendered infertile and also suffered a long series of operable cancers as a result of exposure to radioactive fallout that blanketed Kiev while she was marching in a May Day parade after the meltdown.
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