Hazardous Material

Reviewed by John Burdett
Sunday, November 28, 2004

The hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s Wolves Eat Dogs, Arkady Renko, comes with one of the most illustrious pedigrees in thriller fiction.

Many storytellers saw in the Cold War an opportunity not seen since Homer sang the siege of Troy, but, so far as I know, Smith was the only American writer who dared think out of the box to the point of making his hero a genuine communist. And what a magnificent protagonist Arkady is: zealous investigator for the state prosecutor in Moscow, a Russian to his fingertips, wittily acerbic, sickly pale, rail-thin because he is nourished mostly on nicotine, deeply committed to the lost egalitarian principles of socialism and therefore at odds with both the Party and the West, sardonically pursuing his true love, Irina, across oceans. Continue Reading…