Washington Post review: Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
Smith expertly establishes the eerie, almost extraterrestrial, ambience of this nuclear wasteland where dosimeters are more common than cell phones and even Arkady’s love interest, the irascible-but-saintly doctor Eva Kazka, bears a scar from a thyroid operation. Stories of animal mutations abound, but a hunter makes an interesting ecological point: Exactly because almost all the people have fled, nature in its fullness is returning. Since the Zone is expected to remain poisoned for 50,000 years, the prospects for a long-term, humanity-free, radioactive wildlife sanctuary are pretty good.
Officially the Zone is uninhabited, and those few who live there by choice tend to mutate socially and psychologically, even if they manage to escape thyroid cancer and leukemia. They follow their own laws. Only a true masochist like Arkady would risk his health investigating a murder or two in such a dangerous region when his own boss is demanding a whitewash. Arkady, though, will not rest until he has penetrated to the very heart of that molten monster called Reactor Four. The conclusion is surprisingly tragic in a way that momentarily lifts the book above the thriller genre and into the realm of more serious works.Smith is in a class of his own, probably because his books are genuine novels as well as thrillers. When he rides these two horses perfectly, he produces masterpieces like Gorky Park and Polar Star. Wolves Eat Dogs is not in this class; the deep and the crass are not so skillfully balanced, so that hockey stick-wielding assassins on skates can seem superfluous among the truly grave — and truly terrifying — issues of Chernobyl. It is fissured but still way ahead of the pack and hugely readable.
John Burdett has published a number of novels, the most recent being “Bangkok 8.”