WOLVES EAT DOGS

We're in modern Moscow--swimming in color, all neon and bling. But with high times and towers of glass come high stakes, and when a pillar of new capitalism plummets 10 flights from his opulent digs to the pavement below, it brings Smith's gloomy, lovelorn hero, Arkady Renko, onto the case. Then another body--one of the tycoon's associates--turns up near Chernobyl, mangled and ravaged by wolves. What gives? And what's happening in the toxic villages in the reactor's environs? The ensuing plot is compelling, but so, too, are the descriptions of the wasteland and the empty lives that are the detritus of the nuclear disaster. Ron McLarty narrates the story with power and care, conveying both the images of the ruined landscape of the "zone of exclusion" and, with subtle accenting, the worn-out spirits of its inhabitants. M.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB/ MAR 05]