Bookraft

Wolves Eat Dogs is the fifth in the Arkady Renko series of Moscow misertries. This is a portmanteau of 'miseries' and 'mysteries' that seem to abound in the under-world that is justice and detective work in Russia. The author certainly has the beaten down in Investigator Renko whose only strength, principled detective work, is a great liability yet again in the now nouveau resource rich Russia. Even better, the gravelly voice and paced reading by Ron McLarty gives audio-visual strength to our imaginings of the substance and dishevel that is always about Renko. It is sort of a permanent penchant to wobble to off-kilter. This is wonderfully reflected in Renko's refusal to button up a "suicide case" as all the top Moscow police brass want him to. Instead Renko busts the case open when he discovers that the crime scene is so radioactive that maybe the Pasha who committed suicide had every reason to do so.


For this insight Renko and the reader are rewarded with a trip to the Ukraine and the Zone. The Zone is the 100 mile radius area at the borders between the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia where the Chernobyl reactors sit like waiting radioactive boddhavista gods ready to rust, crack, seep and maybe explode again. Wildlife and people have come back - but each cope in different ways. This is where Wolves eat Dogs.

The Nature of the Times have made this story even more curiously and coincidentally relative. One can't help think of the Wolves on Wall Street who have unleashed three near-Chernobyls of ever increasing menace on the world scene in the past 20 years. Renko's Russian oligarchs are just another wolfpack like the Wall Street Wolves who have returned to their dens hardly chastened. Wall Street have barely paused but to reset their super-compensation systems and incentives, their super-computing trick utilities, and their perfect information blinds and redoubts to manipulate markets to their advantage. Ditto for the Moscow elites who want minimal perturbations as they recalibrate with one of their alpha Wolves down.

But this story is not so much about the recalibration, but about the radioactive people still decaying 20 years after Chernobyl. The passages, countryside and lives Cruz and Renko takes us through are haunting. And to think, this Zone is just 100 miles around. In this world of the Zone one cant help but feel, like a Renko hunch, that the Financial Wolves will probably release a truly world devastating reaction well before relentless climate change or a festering Chernobyl get to do their worst.