Wolves Eat Dogs

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Another reviewer has remarked that "Wolves Eat Dogs" is set in "the radioactive wasteland around Chernobyl," a "grim circle of hell straight out of Dante's Inferno." Yes, and there is also in this novel the magical and strange mood of dark folklore and myth. Arkady, the mordant knight-errant, travels in the land of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folklore.

In the radioactive rubble, an old man and his wife, a woman with steel teeth, tend an unruly cow, fishermen pull mutant catfish from a "cooling pond," and stuffed bears and dolls are the only occupants of broken houses in the black villages.

The innocent child of the Baba Yaga tale finds salvation through kind acts. In Smith's allegory it is hard to find innocence, but kind acts indeed happen.

A corrupt American businessman and an ancient Jewish hit man, "a black angel," flee the Zone to escape the police, but on their way out stop to don yarmulkes and shawls and chant the Kaddish over and over again near the "black hole" of the Chernobyl power station. Arkady thinks they are too late, but the old hit man nods as if to say they are fine.

Another character, Eva, is almost a parody of her ancient and innocent sister, Eve. She is a woman made infertile by the surgeons who have cut out tumors caused by her exposure to radioactivity. She is bitterly damaged, but still she selflessly submits to rape in an attempt to bargain for Arkady's life.

Like the bumpkin knight Parsifal, Arkady first fails to "get it." He misunderstands Eva's sacrifice and turns his back on her when she needs him most. He tries to avoid a silent child, an orphan, who can't express his need for Arkady's love.

Arkady unravels the murder mystery that started him on his quest, but doesn't understand the possibility of his own redemption until near the end. In the airport in Kiev, back in the "real world" occupied by families and children, Arkady has a chance encounter with a mobster on the lam. There is a decision to make. Arrest him or not?

Read the novel.

Perhaps cynical Arkady, the world-weary cop, is ironically the most innocent of all the characters. Like a character in a story by Hawthorne, he must learn to join the brotherhood of sinners.

This isn't just another detective novel. This is a literate novel rich in characterizations, imagery, and theme. Who cares who dunnit?



Rating:
Summary: save your money
Review: I have read all his books and his recent stuff just continues to go downhill. Rose was the biggest waste of time. This is the same garbage. If you want to enjoy a good Russian mystery series, read Kaminsky's books about Rostnikov.

Rating:
Summary: Aren't we all a little like Renko?
Review: I love this series because the characters are real and the dilemmas profoundly reflective of the world in which we live. Renko just deals with the rotten hands he is played and does so with selflessness, honor and integrity. Despite being surrounded by vice and corruption--Renko remains true to himself. All of the books in the series deal with the triumph of the human spirit over the most appalling of circumstances but Smith's setting of "Wolves Eat Dogs" primarily at the location of the Chernobyl nuclear accident is inspired. The residents of the radioactive "zone" are, as is Renko, themselves dealing the best they can with the same toxic and tragic results of poor Soviet decision-making. Moral decay is juxtaposed with the omnipresent radioactive decay and shown to be no less dangerous. Without betraying the story, let's just say that some of characters deal with their circumstances better than others.

"Wolves Eat Dogs" is the rare work that is confident in portraying the truth that happiness is truly independent of what the world may claim to be success; that all obstacles can be overcome and that integrity is indeed its own reward. Such frank treatment of moral issues is, in my opinion, a hallmark of worthy literature.

The fact that this is a story that is resolved without being solved is by itself enough to make this a five-star mystery. Without spoiling the read, let me just say that few authors are able to so skillfully and satisfactorily misdirect the reader as Mr. Smith. Highly recommended--definitely a book that you can't put down until you are finished.


Rating:
Summary: Truth is scarier than fiction
Review: I loved Wolves Eat Dogs, and was torn between wanting to keep reading it and not wanting it to be finished.... The Arkady Renko series are not perfect detective novels - they tend to end slightly less interestingly than they start. Nevertheless, I've found them all hugely enjoyable, because few current writers can convey a sense of time, place, events and history as convincingly and effectively as Martin Cruz Smith.

Gorky Park is one of my all-time favourite books, one of the few I have re-read regularly. It has the most evocative atmosphere, and a story that simply wouldn't work anywhere else. Wolves Eat Dogs is just as good.

From the winter cold of the pre-Glasnost Soviet Union in Gorky Park through the fervour and political upheaval of Red Square, the history and happenings are made part of the characters' lives and of the story. To appreciate how well this is done in the Renko novels, you only need to read one of the many imitators of Gorky Park, where less skillful authors simply set a sub-standard story in 'exotic' Moscow, hoping for an instant edge - Vodka by Boris Starting is just one recent failed example.


Like Gorky Park & Red Square (Havana Bay was not quite at their standard) Wolves Eat Dogs starts with a weird and compelling crime, and is set in the most unusual locale yet - the Exclusion Zone, the 30km circle around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Inside the zone, fatalistic about its dangers and not quite believing that 'vodka protects against radiation,' are a finely drawn assortment of oddball & cynical residents, scientists & opportunists. Sent to the Zone to prevent him from finding clues closer to home, Arkady Renko stubbornly continues his unpopular murder investigation in the Zone's insular communities, to the beat of his ever-ticking radiation dosimeter.


But it's the spooky, creepy, dangerous location itself which gives so much to this story. The images of the deserted towns, the 'black' radioactive villages, stagnant cooling ponds, ruins too contaminated to move or even bury, & the lead sarcophagus ineffectively shielding Reactor Number 4 are all the more haunting for being true.


Life is stranger and much scarier than fiction. While the Chernobyl accident has long faded from Western news, Wolves Eat Dogs, while also a first-rate crime novel, paints a picture of Chernobyl's bleak & terrible legacy that will stay wih you long after you finish the book.

Rating:
Summary: from chichikov to pasha ivanov
Review: In the late fifties Luciano, Lansky and Co. wanted to turn a tiny island of Cuba into an enterprise where the Mob could have a working relationship "with a friendly government". The revolution put an end to their plans. Well, forty years later a symbiotic relationship between the Syndicate and the government was established in a land spanning eleven time zones. The corruption inherent in the old Soviet system has proven to be endemic to the heirs of that particular socio/economic/cultural "zone"(pun intended and based on the polysemy of the word). In his investigator Renko series Smith has established himself as the by far the best foreign writer of the genre. He is unsurpassed in precise and relevant detail, keen observation, subtle innuendo, as well as the ability to maintain a certain directionality of the moral compass. Renko is a controversial figure, a cop with a sense of justice operating in a sea of corruption. The sheer magnitude of the crime and its pervasive nature render Renko's mission a futile, quihotic exercise. However, while in terms of cynicism he is a good match for Sam Spade, his ability to compromise is supremely inferior. Perhaps because deviance exists only in relation to cultural norms, it is indispensable for the process of generating and sustaining morality. Consequently, responding to deviance clarifies moral boundaries. Also, responding to deviance promotes social unity as people typically react to serious deviance with collective outrage. It is quite ironic that according to Durkheim deviant people suggest alternatives to the status quo and help bring social change. What has happened in the vast expanse formerly called the soviet Union was that yesterday's deviance has established itself as today's morality. Here we are not talking about deviant subculture. What chances does Renko have to change anything? Zilch!!! His place of honor is a private station. It was absolutely the same twenty, forty, sixty years ago. The plot of the Wolves is pretty convoluted, although a bilingual reader will find a sufficient number of similar material written in Russian. The characterization is superb, Pasha's American partner is one of those quintessential Shylocks who swarmed into Russia in the early nineties. Give him credit though, he's much more suave than a lot of the expats I've known. Chernobyl chapters are probably the best. Perhaps the best insight into the enigma of the Russian life is the relationship between Renko and the orphan kid. Few people in the West remember that it was their beloved proverbial bungler Gorbachev who refused to acknowledge the disaster and decreed to proceed with a celebration and massive cycling competition. But the infatuation and the euphoria continued when a dypsomaniac with urinary incontinence was made the first President. Incidentally, on my short sojourn in Kiev in 1989, the nosebleeds came regularly and amply.

Rating:
Summary: Renko still keeping the wolves at bay
Review: Martin Cruz Smith latched onto a good thing back in 1981 with Gorky Park, when he introduced his laconic, world-weary but terribly smart and effective investigator, Arcady Renko. Thank heavens he refuses to let go. Arcady Renko is the most fascinating reoccurring character in fiction today, maybe ever.

What makes Renko so interesting is the way he has negotiated the shark and pirate-invested waters of the Soviet Union/Russia for over 25 years, and the magic of the series is the taciturn yet graceful manner in which Renko always keeps his head just above water. Many seemingly tougher and smarter men and women have vanished beneath the icy, gray waves of Russian politics and crime over the years, but he is still here bobbing around, searching for the hard truth no one wants to see.

In this novel the hard truth lies in the radioactive pit created in the Ukraine around Chernobyl - the "Zone." I won't go into the details, which you can read for yourself. Suffice to say that the "New Russia" is perhaps more shark-invested than the old Soviet Union, as the economic free-for-all of capitalism unleashes wolves and dogs alike which had once been kept on the iron leash of communism.

Renko is still alive, still turning over the smooth stones to reveal the dark, chaotic life underneath. What a treat. -Mykal Banta


Rating:
Summary: Global Crime Thriller Set in Chernobyl
Review: Martin Cruz Smith writes an absolutely terrific thriller about global crime & espionage. The story is a page-turner that is packed with colorful characters and a great story. What I found most fascinating about this book was the setting in Moscow, Kiev, and Chernobyl. The last location, particularly, really is quite a gem. How the author creates life out of a part of the globe that is taken by many to be a radioactive wasteland. But life goes on. Martin Cruz Smith makes a strong case for the underworld of survivors and predators that exist here. Definitely captures the imagination.

Rating:
Summary: Wolves Eat Dogs
Review: Searching for the reason behind a mysterious suicide, Arkady Renko ends up in the radioactive zone around Chernobyl.

Like the author's earlier works, this novel transcends its mystery-thriller genre in its quality. Smith has a perfect eye for the telling detail, the understated comment. The novel's dark, ironic, threatening mood, with its flashes of light in which human interaction defies death, never falters.

At times, the plot meanders, and here and there it drops a beat. However, the story's other good qualities make up for that. In particular, the "villain", despite committing the heinous crime of a long dialogue infodump explaining what he did and how and why, after which he of course intends to shoot the progagonist, is interesting because to many readers, including myself, his motivations won't seem villainous at all. For the most part, this novel avoids the obvious and demonstrates a mastery of brutally effective understatement.



Rating:
Summary: Superior Thriller
Review: This is probably the best book in this series since Gorky Park. Wolves Eat Dogs has a superior plot with good quality writing. The hero, Renko, continues to be an attractive character. The theme of this book is second chances.

Rating:
Summary: Too confusing
Review: Wolves Eat Dogs is too much trouble to read - takes too much effort. Most of the dialogue seems disconnected, like a dream.