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Title: Wolves Eat Dogs
Review: Searching for the reason behind a mysterious suicide, Arkady Renko ends up in the radioactive zone around Chernobyl.Like the author's earlier works, this novel transcends its mystery-thriller genre in its quality. Smith has a perfect eye for the telling detail, the understated comment. The novel's dark, ironic, threatening mood, with its flashes of light in which human interaction defies death, never falters.At times, the plot meanders, and here and there it drops a beat. However, the story's other good qualities make up for that. In particular, the "villain", despite committing the heinous crime of a long dialogue infodump explaining what he did and how and why, after which he of course intends to shoot the progagonist, is interesting because to many readers, including myself, his motivations won't seem villainous at all. For the most part, this novel avoids the obvious and demonstrates a mastery of brutally effective understatement.
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