Wolves Eat Dogs - Tapa dura

All night earthmovers tore at the old city and dug widening pools of light to raise a modern, vertical Moscow more like Houston or Dubai. It was a Moscow that Pasha Ivanov had helped to create, a shifting landscape of tectonic plates and lava flows and fatal missteps . . . Pasha Ivanov, one of Russia's richest oligarchs, is lying dead on the pavement outside his luxury high-rise apartment in Moscow. His death, it seems, is a straightforward case of suicide. Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, however, has never been one to take evidence at face value and there's something puzzling him that he simply refuses to ignore: a mountain of salt found in Ivanov's wardrobe . . . Renko's investigations take him to the notorious exclusion zone, the area around Chernobyl deserted and forgotten for almost two decades. "The Zone" is a place of mystery, danger - and sometimes - unimaginable beauty. When the body of Lev Timofeyev, Pasha Ivanov's former research partner, is discovered in a contaminated cemetery, it is only the beginning of Renko's journey into this labyrinthine netherworld of crime - and an investigation that is about to uncover some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets.

Martin Cruz Smith is the author of Gorky Park, as well as Stallion Gate, Polar Star, Red Square, Rose and Havana Bay, among other novels. He lives in California with his wife and three children.