Fifth in the addictive series of novels about former Soviet (and now plain Russian) homicide investigator, Arkady Renko, who we first met in Cruz Smith’s 1981 international bestseller, Gorky Park. It’s 23 years later and a lot has happened in that time, namely the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bewilderingly quick transformation of Russia into a criminal society, dominated by billionaire oligarchs and a ferocious mafia, just about held in place by Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian state.
Cruz Smith/Renko’s unique selling point is the way he uses routine police procedurals to delve into this murky society. (In fact, its two predecessors had varied the scene by being set in Germany and Cuba, respectively.) This one marks a return to Mother Russia for its beginning, before shifting scene to become a wonderfully haunting evocation of the devastated towns and villages around the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine.
The corpse
Millionaire Pasha Ivanov has apparently killed himself by jumping out the tenth floor of his luxury apartment block. He was the president of a typical new Russian enterprise, NoviRus. The novel opens like a scene from Colombo or a thousand other American cop dramas with all the dead man’s business partners, mistresses etc gathered tearfully in the apartment as Arkady assesses them and asks the time-honoured question: Did he jump or was he pushed?
Assembled are Arkady’s boss, angry prosecutor Zurin; Arkady’s assistant, the burly alcoholic Victor; the dead man’s girlfriend-cum-interior designer Rina Shevchenko; a NoviRus vice-president Lev Timofeyev; and Ivanov’s fat American fixer, Bobby Hoffman. Not physically present, but looming in the background is the head of NoviRus security, the feared Colonel Ozhogin.
Arkady and co had in fact already been investigating Ivanov’s affairs but, with his death, Zurin is keen to get a quick decision that it was suicide and so close the case. The official reason is that we Zurin and his superiors don’t want to do anything which will spook foreign investors any more than necessary, Moscow has a bad enough reputation anyway, etc.
But Arkady, as is his way, refuses to move quickly. He ponders. Does Zurin has darker motives for his hurry to shut it down? Did their investigation prompt the suicide? Why, though – they hadn’t turned up anything incriminating – or were they on the verge of doing so… questions, questions.
The milieu the dead man moved in, the circle of Russia’s new super-rich, is vividly depicted when Arkady, in a later scene, crashes a party of the New Rich and is quietly appalled:
They saw themselves as the robber barons of the American Wild West, and didn’t someone say that every great fortune started with a crime? Russia already had over thirty billionaires, more than any other country. That was a lot of crime. (p.81)
A search of Ivanov’s apartment had turned up one standout peculiarity: his wardrobe was found to be full of salt, there was salt in several drawers and cupboards, there turns out to be salt in his gut and he was clutching a salt shaker when he jumped. Why?
Zhenya
In a separate strand, Arkady has been inveigled by a lady friend into visiting an orphanage and cheering up the kids, so that they end up taking one of them out for the day, the silent, traumatised 11-year-old Evgeny Lysenko aka ‘Zhenya’.
Next time Arkady turns up at the orphanage to discover the lady journalist hasn’t, and so Arkady finds himself, reluctantly, taking the totally silent boy out for another outing and then, despite himself, drawn into taking him on regular Sunday outings, the boy permanently silent and clutching his chess set and book of fairy tales while Arkady, as so often, questions himself, his action and his motives.
Moscow
The first hundred pages of this 400-page novel are set in Moscow, as Arkady pursues various leads in the Ivanov case, viewing and reviewing the CCTV footage from the dead man’s apartment building, meeting a notorious Mafia hardman, Anton Obodovsky, who phoned Ivanov in his last hours (Arkady has the ‘lucky’ break of finding the dead man’s phone kicked under his bed), wondering if there’s some underworld connection…
These scenes emphasise the thing about Arkady’s character which makes him so appealing. He is not stupid – he is honest, thorough, diligent. But most of the time he doesn’t know what is going on and is as puzzled as the reader. Which is what makes him so likeable.
Towards the end of this section he is searching Ivanov’s apartment for the umpteenth time when he comes across, right at the back of some drawers, more salt and then a dosimeter wrapped in a hankie. Arkady recognises it from his military training a long time ago, as the device you measure radiation with. ‘100’ is about a normal background measure. Arkady turns it on and pokes round the flat and in the wardrobe covered with salt, the reading is 50,000. Arkady’s mouth turns dry, his heart races. Someone was poisoning Ivanov with radioactivity – God, has he, Arkady, also received a fatal dose? (p.106)
Chernobyl
With no warning, without even the opening of a new ‘part’, the next chapter cuts to the abandoned towns and villages around the gutted Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. What? Why did that happen? And it turns out the rest of the novel is devoted to describing the scenery, atmosphere and mood of this strange abandoned place, while Arkady gets to know the handful of locals who still live there and the scientists who are studying the disaster’s impact. How? Why?
Because NoviRus vice-president, Lev Timofeyev, who we met in the opening scene, has been found dead, murdered, in a graveyard in a village in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Arkady’s boss, the prosecutor Zurov, angry at Arkady’s obstinate refusal to confirm Ivanov’s death as suicide, uses the mysterious death to get Arkady out of Moscow and far away from the Ivanov case.
Once again (as in the stunningly good Polar Star) Cruz Smith has come up with a brilliantly imaginative setting for his roaming, endlessly inquisitive hero to explore and investigate, and for his wonderfully evocative prose to paint.
Arkady is shown round the Zone by head of the local militia, Captain Marchenko, upset that his unblemished record has now been blotted with a murder. He introduces Arkady to denizens of the Dead Zone, including environmental scientists led by Alex Gerasimov and his estranged, intense, wife, Eva Kazka. It takes Arkady a long time to realise the odd love-hate relationship between them and only at the end is Alex revealed as a psychopath. Initially he had been courtesy itself, showing Arkady round the zone, introducing him to his fellow research scientists, and in one hair-raising scene, giving his own detailed account of the sequence of events which led to the nuclear disaster (p.214).
In fact Cruz Smith gives Alex a speech conveying a messianic vision of nature returning to claim its own, at a little party given by two old peasants who refuse to leave their village home, Roman and Maria Panasenko (p.219). Alex drunkenly shouts that it’s ‘normal human life’ which is killing nature – if only we could create Zones excluding human beings around the world – maybe every country should have a nuclear catastrophe! (p.164)
Arkady slowly pieces bits of a very confusing jigsaw together, tangling several times with the psychotic Woropay twins, Dymtrus and Taras, who patrol the streets of the ghost city, Pripyat, on roller skates armed with ice hockey bats and night vision goggles (!)
The novel raises and explores numerous dead-ends:
- A shadowy figure, Hulak, phones Arkady requesting a rendezvous at the vast and eerie cooling lake in the shadow of the abandoned reactor. But when Arkady arrives it is to find locals pulling his body out of the water, where they found it, shot through the head.
- Lev Timofeyev’s body was found by a certain officer Karel Katamay, who has since gone missing. Arkady goes to visit Katamay’s father, a tough old construction worker in the city which was built to house evacuees from irradiated Pripyat after the disaster, Slavutych. Confined to a wheelchair by an accident, the angry old man stuffs wild animals and has taught his daughter, Katamay’s sister, Oksanato to hunt and shoot them for him.
- Arkady is surprised to discover his ‘assistant’ Victor Orlov, is in Kiev (capital of the Ukraine, 140 km due south). He has been sent by Prosecutor Zurin to tail Anton Obodovsky – the hard man Arkady spoke to early on in the book – who now appears to be creating a new identity – new teeth, clothes and haircut, as if about to flee the country. Did he have something to do with Ivanov’s death? Why is he fleeing?
- Arkady sees a hooded motorcyclist riding out of one of the abandoned villages with a sidecar stuffed with icons from the peasants’ houses. Next time he disturbs the motorcyclist in mid-theft and gives chase on his own motorbike, in an exciting ride through overgrown fields, across streams and swamps.
- In the event, the phantom thief turns out to be Eva Kazka, Alex’s neurotic, chain-smoking ex-wife, a doctor who spent some time in Chechnya so has seen a lot of brutality, and hides the scar of an operation on her thyroid gland under the scarf. Arkady finds himself lured into an uncomfortable love triangle, not least as Eva tends to make love with a loaded gun either pointed at or alongside her lover. Alex ambushes Arkady and beats him up, a fight which also ends with Arkady having a loaded gun pointed at him. Tough loving.
As mentioned, what makes the Arkady character so attractive is the way he is caught up in situations he only partly understands. He is a sort of everyman figure, wandering through the chaos of post-communist Russia, clever, fit enough, curious, but endlessly on the back foot.
There is a powerful, random scene where Arkady is driving somewhere in Moscow and suddenly comes across rival gangs of skinheads and neo-fascists (supporting Spartak and Dynamo football clubs, respectively) having a riot at a traffic jam on the highway. Tattooed thugs are simply smashing the windscreens of stationary cars, dragging out their terrified occupants, and kicking seven bells out of anyone foreign-looking. Arkady weighs in to save a Vietnamese couple (who it turns out he knows), waving his police badge and pistol around. Only when he’s well into the melee of thugs does Arkady realise that he has in fact removed the bullets from the gun to make it safe for the occasions when he takes young Zhenya out. At which point he feels the sweat breaking on his skin, continuing to threaten the hordes of tattooed hooligans, but knowing any of them could call his bluff at any moment.
It’s a very Arkady scene, our hero a) well-intentioned but b) somehow cocking things up and c) beneath his personal plight, a deeper insight into, a snapshot of, the violent car crash which is contemporary Russian society.
The Jewish connection
Arkady is very surprised when the dead Ivanov’s fat American fixer Hoffman arrives in Chernobly, especially as he is accompanied by a short, but very tough Jewish security man, Yakov, ‘the oldest Jew in the Ukraine’ (p.230), who remembers the famine in the Ukraine, the Red Army and the Nazis – and survived them all.
There emerges a strong Jewish thread to the novel, which brings out the disastrous fate of the Jews of the region. When the Germans invaded in 1942 the people of Pripyat enthusiastically rounded up all their Jews, forced them into boats on the river and shot them up, picking off anyone who tried to swim to safety. (All this reminds me sickeningly of Tom Snyder’s horrifying history book, The Bloodlands.)
In Moscow Hoffman had tried to buy Arkady’s support. Now he has followed him to Chernobyl – but why? As the formal investigation dwindles down to a trickle and then sputters out amid the haunted scenery and strange post-apocalyptic characters of the Zone, Arkady finds himself drawn to Hoffman and Yakov. There are several weird evocative scenes at their camp out by the abandoned Chernobyl Yacht Club, a rusting quay with abandoned boats lining the muddy river.
When Arkady hears that hard-man Colonel Ozhogin is on his way south, he goes out of his way to persuade one of the Zone characters – Bela, a crook who owns a vast boneyard of radioactive cars, trucks, military vehicles and cuts them up and flogs them in the markets of Kiev and Moscow to unsuspecting punters – to smuggle the two Jews out of the dead lands.
It is entirely in keeping with the weird, static, trapped feel of the place and the novel that Arkady then discovers the two Jews changed his instructions and bribed Bela to drive in completely the wrong direction, right to the gates of the nuclear reactor, where Arkady discovers them bobbing their heads as they repeat the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
Only now does it emerge that Ivanov, himself a Jew, had sent Hoffman down here the previous year to pray for him, to seek forgiveness, to beg God’s mercy on his soul, but Hoffman was too sceptical, shy, too American and resistant, to do it. But after the poisoning and suicide of his boss he is at last prepared to make his small supplication in front of the looming concrete ‘sarcophagus’ built over the fatal reactor.
It doesn’t quite make sense as a storyline – like a lot of the plot – but its slight implausibility is dwarfed by the poetry and the imaginative power of the scenes it leads to.
Officer Katamay
Finally Arkady tracks down the security guard who found the body of Timofeyev at the remote graveyard, one Officer Karol Katamay (p.177). He had, suspiciously, gone missing immediately afterwards. Through a sequence of contacts Arkady tracks him down to the baroque setting of the abandoned theatre in the empty ghost town of Pripyat (p.309). Here, Katamay is revealed lying on a divan on the empty stage, his hair carefully beaded and tended, a blanket over him supported by comfy pillows but guarded and patrolled by the two psychotic ice skating twins. Like Pavov and Timofeyev before him, he is obviously stricken by severe radiation sickness, almost continuously bleeding from the nose. Arkady finds out that Alex the research scientist got to know Katamay and asked him to do a job in Moscow.
He was paid to sneak into Ivanov’s apartment, when Alex created a little outage in the security system, with lead-lined boxes, and to wear gloves as he scattered radioactive salt through the apartment. But it seems he wasn’t careful enough and himself became contaminated.
Shootout in Pripyat
The narrative takes Arkady away for further meetings with Eva, phone calls to Victor and so on, before being called back to visit Katamay again. This time he finds the sofa and the recumbent Katamay in the surreal setting of Pripyat’s abandoned funfair. But to Arkady’s disappointment, he has only very recently been stifled with a pillow which, as a result, is soaked in arterial blood. Arkady is holding the murder weapon looking down at the freshly dead man when a swishing sound announces the return of his friends and protectors, the Woropay brothers. They cry out in anguish at the death of their friend and Arkady can only run run run through the deserted streets and into a derelict building, up the stairs, throwing himself out the first floor window onto detritus below and running running running for his life until the brothers catch him, pummeling him to the ground and telling him they’re going to enjoy this as they start to hit him. Bang! One brother falls dead. The other turns to look around and bang! He is dead, too.
Groggily, Arkady looks up to see the blazing-eyed Alex, the visionary scientist who wants the whole world to be irradiated to save it for nature. He makes Arkady pick up one twin while he shoulders the other and they stagger back to the body of Katamay on the sofa. Here Alex turns and finally reveals the whole story.
Ivanov and Timofeyev were assistants at the Institute of Physics in Moscow, assisting Alex’s father, esteemed academician Felix Gerasimov (p.139). On the night of the disaster (26 April 1986) Gerasimov senior had drunk himself unconscious and so when the call came through to the Institute from the Chernobyl reactor, and then from the local authorities, asking what to do – it was Ivanov and Timofeyev who advised them to hush it up and do nothing. Thus poisoning maybe millions of local inhabitants unnecessarily, including the hundreds of thousands who turned out for the May Day parades in all the nearby towns and cities five days later. Including Eva, who had patiently explained to Arkady that her bitterness and anger stem from being irradiated as a teenager, by the stupidity of the authorities. All caused by the craven cowardice of Ivanov and Timofeyev.
On a personal level, when Gerasimov sobered up and realised the bad advice his underlings had given, he immediately ordered an evacuation, but it was this chopping and changing of scientific advice which fatally added to the administrative delays, exposing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to contamination. Gerasimov had been haunted for years and years by his personal failure, until he finally shot himself.
And his son, Alex, was consumed by bitterness at the whole shambles – the drunken father who eventually kills himself, the irradiated lover, the poisoned population. No wonder he had such edge and nerviness in him from the moment Arkady met him, no wonder he was ready to explode into a fierce fist fight when he found Arkady at Eva’s cottage (see above). No wonder he turns out to be an embittered killer.
The big reveal
Now, as he and Arkady drop the bodies of the Woropay twins by the body of the dead security guard Katamay, Alex does what all baddies do in standard crime and thriller novels – he explains the mystery. It was he, Alex, who began to persecute Ivanov and Timofeyev as punishment for that awful night. It was he who secured supplies of difficult-to-access radioactive Cesium 137, indistinguishable from the common or garden salt which he mixed it with and which he had delivered to Ivanov’s apartment, along with the dosimeter, so that Ivanov would realise what had been done to him, and why. By the time Ivanov figured out what was going on it was too late, he’d been too exposed and even eaten some of the radioactive salt.
Alex had arranged for the delivery to be made by a gullible security guard, Katamay, who he’d befriended in the Exclusion Zone and paid to go to Moscow – but the fool was careless and contaminated himself as much as the victims. Alex realised that the dying Katamay was on the verge of revealing everything to Arkady and so, just half an hour earlier, smothered him with his pillow. And now has killed the only other people who Katamay might have told, the Woropay twins.
All through this explanation Alex has been pointing his gun at Arkady. He explains that he’s going to arrange the bodies in just such a layout that it looks like they’ve all shot each other – and shot the intrusive Moscow investigator, too.
The local investigators are not up to Moscow standards (as the way they botched the investigation into Timofeyev’s death demonstrated) so it will be easy enough to fake the scene and make it look like they all shot each other. So he asks Arkady to move just a bit to his left, yes, this should be about the right angle, just about – BANG!
Arkady barely hears the shot before he realises Alex is crumpling to the ground. Out of the shadows emerges Katamay’s sister, Oksana, who we met in the apartment of her overbearing father in Slavutych, and who we now remember was taught how to use a hunting rifle since she was a little girl. She had come to see her brother. She found him dead. Then she overheard Alex’s admission of his murder. Now the rather simple girl asks, ‘Did I do right?’ Arkady, his heart barely pumping at his sudden reprieve, reassures her that yes she did, then tiptoes away from the scene of these multiple crimes, leaving her cradling the head of her dead brother…
Epilogue
It is some months later. Eva is living with Arkady in Moscow and they both now regularly take the silent orphan Zhenya for outings.
They get a post card from the ancient peasants Eva had introduced him to in the Exclusion Zone, Roman and Maria, inviting them back for a small village feast and and decide to drive back to the blighted land for a visit.
Here, in an unexpectedly moving conclusion, Eva and Arkady assist with the ritual slaughter of the village pig and – to everyone’s amazement – Zhenya talks, enthusiastically throwing himself into this gross, pagan, primitive action, something in it releasing his spring.
After the butchering and the ritual feast for the small number of locals, Zhenya, Eva and Arkady motor back to Moscow with hope in their hearts for the future.
While some of the plot devices are hackneyed or convenient, over-riding them is the attractiveness of the Arkady character, the inventiveness of the situations he finds himself, the sheer imaginative otherness which Cruz Smith captures so brilliantly. This is a fabulous marvellous book.
Wonderful prose style
Cruz Smith is a pleasure to read, not only because of the intelligent plots, and the winning character of Renko himself, but also because of his magic turns of phrase. Admittedly not on every page, rationed to a handful per chapter – but when they come they set the language alight.
The marble lobby was so brightly lit that everyone wore halos. (p.38)
Of the suicide’s body, as captured on CCTV:
Upper and lower body collapsed into a ring of dust that exploded from the pavement. (p.40)
Colonel Ozhogin menaces Arkady at NoviRus HQ:
Ozhogin leaned closer, a hammer taking aim on a nail. (p.56)
And generally, he has a way of making the language dance.
Evgeny Lysenko, nickname Zhenya, age eleven, looked like an old man waiting at a bus stop. (p.17)
There was something smug and miserly about Victor when he drove, as if he had figured out one bare-bones sexual position. (p.63)
The Chernobyl militia station was a brick building with a linden tree sprouting from a corner like a feather in a cap. (p.145)
Black smoke poured out of the tailpipe of the Moskvich like a bad temper. (p.154)
Bela picked a hair off his shoulder. In his dirty white suit he looked like a lily beginning to rot. (p.305)
When Eva and Arkady finally make love, it is described in spare clipped sentences and then an extraordinary image.
They were two starving people feeding from the same spoon. (p.279)
Cruz Smith is one of the best poets in prose I know of writing today.
Dramatis personae
Moscow
Arkady Renko – Tall, skinny hangdog Russian homicide detective, who starts out investigating the mysterious death of multi-millionaire Pasha Ivanov, but ends up exploring the eerily devastated landscape around Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
Prosecutor Zurin – Arkady’s boss who gets cross with him – like all his bosses do – for persisting with his questioning even after being told to stop.
Victor Orlov – Arkady’s alcoholic assistant detective.
Pasha Ivanov – New Russian multi-millionaire CEO of NoviRus whose apparent suicide kick starts the plot. Turns out he was dying of radiation poisoning, sent him in revenge for the role he played in the Chernobyl disaster.
Rina Shevchenko – Ivanov’s girlfriend-cum-interior designer.
Lev Timofeyev – NoviRus vice-president, also poisoned with radiation.
Colonel Ozhogi – head of NoviRus security, who comes gunning for Arkady in Chernobyl.
Bobby Hoffman – Ivanov’s fat Jewish assistant.
Yakov – The tough Jewish hired gun Hoffman picks up to protect him when he comes to the Ukraine.
Evgeny Lysenko aka ‘Zhenya’ – 11-year-old orphan who Arkady finds himself looking after.
Anton Obodovsky – Mafia hardman who phoned Ivanov hours before his death but has the excuse that he was in prison at the time. But when Victor reports seeing him in Kiev, apparently undergoing a change of identity, Arkady wonders if he somehow killed the millionaire and is now about to flee.
Chernobyl
Captain Marchenko – head of the local militia in the Excluded Zone around the abandoned Chernobyl power station, initially friendly to Arkady who manages to alienate him by disobeying advice and accumulating dead bodies wherever he goes, as usual.
Alex Gerasimov – chief environmental scientist in the Exclusion Zone, starts off courteous and considerate, but reveals his nutty side when he explains that there should be more nuclear accidents so that nature can return to the devastated zones, and beats Arkady up when the latter begins an affair with Eva, his ex-wife, before finally emerging as the murderer.
Eva Kazka – Alex’s estranged wife, a doctor, bitter at being unnecessarily irradiated because the authorities didn’t evacuate local inhabitants in time, she has served in Chechnya ie seen many horrors. She and Arkady end up having an edgy affair during which she more than once threatens him with a gun.
Felix Gerasimov – Alex’s father and one-time head of the Institute of Physics in Moscow, who was drunk and unconscious when news came through of the Chernobyl disaster, thus allowing his two subordinates Ivanov and Timofeyev to give the bad advice to the authorities to do nothing.
Roman and Maria Panasenko – two ancient peasants who’ve refused to leave the Zone and live in in their one-bedroom hovel, raising vegetables and livestock. It’s at a small party at their house that Alex makes his big speech about how nature would benefit from more nuclear disasters. And the novel closes with a moving account of Eva, Zhenya and Arkady invited back to their house to take part in the slaughter of their pig and accompanying fiesta.
Officer Karol Katamay – of the Chernobyl militia, Katamay finds the body of Timofeyev in the cemetery in the Excluded Zone with his throat cut. Turns out he was persuaded by Alex to deliver radioactive cesium mixed in with salt to Ivanov’s luxury apartment to poison him, but in the process Katamay contaminated himself and is now close to death.
Katamay senior – Katamay’s father, an overbearing construction worker, injured in an accident and now wheelchair-bound, assisted by his daughter, Katamay’s sister, Oksanato, who he has taught to hunt and shoot wild animals from an early age.
Oksanato Katamay – Karel Katamay’s sister, a rather simple-minded young woman, totally bald from radiation poisoning, who turns out to be the deus ex machina when she shoots and kills Alex Gerasimov just as he was about to murder Arkady. Phew.
The Woropay twins, Dymtrus and Taras – simple, stupid and very violent young men, good friends of the dying Katamay, they like skating round the empty streets of the ghost city of Pripyat brandishing ice hockey sticks and wearing night vision goggles. When the twins discover Arkady apparently red-handed in the act of smothering their friend at the climax of the novel, the twins chase him through the empty streets of the ghost town, catch and are about to finish him off, when they are both expertly shot by the psycho Alex Gerasimov.
Bela – Dodgy businessman who runs a huge scrapyard full of the vehicles abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster, who makes money by breaking them up for parts which he sells in Kiev and Moscow. Arkady persuades him to pack up and leave, taking Bobby and Yakov with him before the fearsome Colonel Ozhogin arrives to wreak havoc on anybody he thinks is threatening NoviRus. Bobby in fact pays Bela to drive them to the very gates of Chernobyl where Arkady finds him and Yakov, in a weirdly powerful scene, offering Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of the dead, to the vast radioactive sarcophagus.
Credit
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith was published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. All quotes and references to the 2005 Pan paperback edition.
Related links
- Wolves Eat Dogs on Amazon
- Wolves Eat Dogs Wikipedia article
- Martin Cruz Smith website
- Martin Cruz Smith Wikipedia article
- Chernobyl disaster Wikipedia article
- Review in the Guardian
- Review in the New York Review of Books
Arkady Renko novels
Smith is a prolific writer. Under his own name or pseudonyms, he has written some 28 novels to date. The eight novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko make up the longest series based on one character:
1981 Gorky Park – Introducing Arkady Renko and the case of the three faceless corpses found in Gorky Park, in the heart of Moscow, who turn out to be victims of John Osborne, the slick American smuggler of priceless live sables.
1989 Polar Star – In the first novel, Renko had clashed with his own superiors in Moscow. Now he is forced to flee across Russia, turning up some years later, working on a Soviet fish factory ship in the Bering Sea. Here, once his former profession becomes known, he is called on by the captain to solve the mystery of a female crew member whose body is caught in one of the ship’s own fishing nets. Who murdered her? And why?
1992 Red Square – After inadvertently helping the Russian security services in the previous book, Arkady is restored to his job as investigator in Moscow. It is 1991 and the Soviet Union is on the brink of dissolution so his bosses are happy to despatch the ever-troublesome Arkady to Munich, then on to Berlin, to pursue his investigations into an art-smuggling operation – to be reunited with Irina (who he fell in love with in Gorky Park) – before returning for a bloody climax in Moscow set against the backdrop of the August 1991 military coup.
1999 Havana Bay – Some years later, depressed by the accidental death of his wife, Irina, Arkady is ssent to Havana, Cuba, to investigate the apparent death of his old adversary, ex-KGB officer Colonel Pribluda. He finds himself at the centre of a murderous conspiracy, in an alien society full of colourful music by day and prostitution and voodoo ceremonies by night, and forced to work closely with a tough local black policewoman, Ofelia Orosio, to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the novel.
2004 Wolves Eat Dogs The apparent suicide of a New Russian millionaire leads Arkady to Chernobyl, the village and countryside devastated by the world’s worst nuclear accident – and it is in this bleak, haunting landscape that Arkady finds a new love and the poisonous secret behind a sequence of grisly murders.
2007 Stalin’s Ghost The odd claim that Stalin has been sighted at a Moscow metro station leads Arkady to cross swords with fellow investigator Nikolai Isakov, whose murky past as a special forces soldier in Chechnya and current bid for political office come to dominate a novel which broadens out to become an wide-ranging exploration of the toxic legacy of Russia’s dark history.
2010 Three Stations In the shortest novel in the series, Arkady solves the mystery of a ballet-obsessed serial killer, while the orphan boy he’s found himself adopting, Zhenya, has various adventures in the rundown district around Moscow’s notorious Three Stations district.
2013 Tatiana – is Tatiana Petrovna, an investigative journalist who appears to have jumped to her death from the 6th floor of her apartment block. When Arkady investigates her death he discovers a trail leading to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Coast and a huge corruption scandal which will involve him in love and death amid the sand dunes of the atmospheric ‘Curonian Split’.
Books & Boots 