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Summary
Summary
With Arkady Renko, Smith created one of the iconic sleuths of contemporary fiction. Renko returns to investigate international plots that drive one of Russia's billionaire businessmen to jump to his death.
Author Notes
Martin Cruz Smith is a writer of suspense novels. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on November 3, 1942 but grew up in New Mexico and the Philadelphia area. Smith earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Smith worked for local television stations, newspapers, and the Associated Press. His early work was published under the names Simon Quinn, Jake Logan, and Martin Smith. Smith is best known for a series of suspense/thrillers featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. The first of these books, Gorky Park, was published in 1981 and adapted as a film starring William Hurt and Lee Marvin two years later. An earlier film of his work, Nightwing, directed by Arthur Hiller, was released in 1979. Smith is a member of the Authors League of America and the Authors Guild.
In 2013 his title Tatiana made The New York Times Best Seller List. The Girl from Venice also became a bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Smith's melancholy, indefatigable Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has been exiled to some bitter venues in the past including blistering-hot Cuba in Havana Bay and the icy Bering sea in Polar Star but surely the strangest (and most fascinating) is his latest, the eerie, radioactive landscape of post-meltdown Chernobyl. Renko is called in to investigate the 10-story, plunge-to-the-pavement death of Pasha Ivanov, fabulously wealthy president of Moscow's NoviRus corporation, whose death is declared a suicide by Renko's boss, Prosecutor Zurin. Renko, being Renko, isn't sure it's suicide and wonders about little details like the bloody handprints on the windowsill and the curious matter of the closet filled with 50 kilos of salt. And why is NoviRus's senior vice-president Lev Timofeyev's nose bleeding? Renko asks too many questions, so an annoyed Zurin sends him off to Chernobyl to investigate when Timofeyev turns up in the cemetery in a small Ukrainian town with his throat slit and his face chewed on by wolves. The cemetery lies within the dangerously radioactive 30-kilometer circle called the Zone of Exclusion, populated by a contingent of scientists, a detachment of soldiers and those the elderly, the crooks, the demented who have sneaked back to live in abandoned houses and apartments. The secret of Ivanov and Timofeyev's deaths lies somewhere in the Zone, and the dogged Renko, surrounded by wolves both animal and human, refuses to leave until he unravels the mystery. It's the Zone itself and the story of Chernobyl that supplies the riveting backbone of this novel. Renko races around the countryside on his Uralmoto motorcycle, listening always to the ominous ticking of his dosimeter as it counts the dangerous levels of radioactivity present in the food, the soil, the air and the people themselves as they lie, cheat, love, steal, kill and die. Agent, Knox Burger. 7-city author tour. (Nov. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The terminally melancholic Russian investigator Arkady Renko, whose cynicism is perpetually at war with his need to dig a little deeper, was last seen five years ago in Havana, where the rusting idealism of post-Soviet Cuba mirrored the detective's ravaged inner life. Leave it to Cruz Smith to find an even more evocative setting for the battered Renko: the Zone of Exclusion, the dreaded no-man's land around Chernobyl, an officially abandoned, contaminated area where a bizarre assortment of stubborn Ukrainians, crazed entrepreneurs, and determined researchers continue to live in the shadow of Reactor Four, the sarcophagus, site of the world 's worst nuclear accident. The case that takes Renko to Chernobyl involves the death of Pasha Ivanov, a billionaire businessman, symbol of the New Russia. Why would such a man commit suicide, jumping from the window of his Moscow apartment, and why was his closet floor covered with salt? Renko, the perennial outsider whose career is officially on the skids (Some men march confidently from one historical era to another; others skid ), is assigned the simple task of sweeping the suicide under the rug, but naturally, he does the opposite, obsessed by the seemingly inexplicable salt and determined, as always, to keep digging no matter how loudly the bureaucrats scream. Perhaps that's why Renko feels oddly comfortable in Chernobyl: the bureaucrats are out of earshot in a surreal shadow world where the dosimeters (to measure radiation) provide the backbeat for a grayed-out version of life just this side of The Twilight Zone. Even more than Havana Bay, this novel demonstrates Cruz Smith's remarkable ability to meld character with landscape, and if Renko seems to find a shred of hope in the end, we know not to turn our dosimeters off quite yet. --Bill Ott Copyright 2004 Booklist
Guardian Review
Wolves Eat Dogs, by Martin Cruz Smith (Pan, pounds 6.99) Pasha Ivanov, a physicist-turned-billionaire, has fallen to his death from his palatial 10th-floor Moscow apartment. A salt-shaker is found beside his body, and there is a large mound of salt inside his wardrobe - why? Inspector Arkady Renko's investigation takes him inside Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion, where the director of Ivanov's company has been found with his throat cut. Martin Cruz Smith writes brilliantly about Chernobyl's toxic wasteland, empty but for militia, cynical scientists, elderly residents who chose to ignore the dosimeters, and predators, both human and animal. Nature is poisonous, life is cheap, vodka is regarded as the best protection against radiation, and crimes go unsolved. The human corruption and the fatalism and ennui that go with it are just as deadly a cocktail as the unseen menace issuing from the damaged reactors. Wolves Eat Dogs is an exceptional, thought-provoking mystery, but it is Renko himself, scarred by his Soviet past, often despairing, yet idealistic and doggedly persistent, who makes this book so compelling and provides a much-needed glimmer of hope at the end. Caption: article-wolves.1 Pasha Ivanov, a physicist-turned-billionaire, has fallen to his death from his palatial 10th-floor Moscow apartment. A salt-shaker is found beside his body, and there is a large mound of salt inside his wardrobe - why? Inspector Arkady Renko's investigation takes him inside Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion, where the director of Ivanov's company has been found with his throat cut. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
In his first outing in five years, Arkady Renko (Havana Bay, 1999, etc.) goes to the forbidden zone around post-disaster Chernobyl, where wolves have returned. Is Russia better now? Detective Renko's Moscow doesn't seem to be. Prosecutor Zurin, to whom the widowed policeman answers, is as arbitrary and slippery as any Brezhnev era apparatchik, and the future of 11-year-old Zhenya, an orphan Renko inherited from a flighty lady friend, is as bleak as any Soviet scenario. And the murder that's just been dropped on his plate offers Renko as many opportunities to screw up his life as an old-fashioned KGB investigation. Filthy-rich businessman Pasha Ivanov either defenestrated himself or was defenestrated from his 11th- story digs, landing on, of all things, a saltshaker. And there's salt heaped all over the newly vacated apartment wherein sits Ivanov's very shaken American assistant, Bobby Hoffman. Renko's investigation is officially cut short by Prosecutor Zurin, who lets him know that what they have on the sidewalk is a suicide and that things are to be wound up quickly. But even with a totally compromised crime scene, the detective knows there's more to the story, and he obeys Hoffman's urgent plea to follow up. The trail leads to Pripyat, the abandoned and quarantined scientific city near Chernobyl that was built to house the technocrats, engineers, and scientists who created and ran the world's biggest concentration of nuclear reactors. In this weird ghost town, where one of Pasha Ivanov's vice presidents was found with his throat slashed, Renko comes upon squatters, scavengers, savage soldiers, and Eva, a strung-out but sexy physician who treats the radiation wounds of the natives who refuse to leave. Important answers come from one of the nearby villages where old peasants, thumbing their nose at the radiation, live as they have lived for centuries. As always, Smith (December 6, 2002, etc.) imagines a Russia that is sad, broken, and, somehow, romantically irresistible. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When one of those really rich New Russians leaps to his death, who to call in but Arkady Renko of Gorky Park fame? (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
