Russian sleuth Renko returns inflawed but well-written 'Wolves'

"Wolves Eat Dogs" opens with the apparent suicide of one of the biggest oligarchs in "the new Russia." That would be today's Russia, full of sharks who amassed illicit fortunes from failing government enterprises and live in a world of bulletproof SUVs, drugs, bottle blondes, and burly bodyguards.

Pasha Ivanov owns a conglomerate called NoviRus, and his tentacles in and out of government compromise everyone they touch. Yet he jumps out of his luxury Moscow apartment to his death. An autopsy reveals a lot of salt in his stomach. Renko finds more of the stuff on Ivanov's closet floor. Then he learns it's radioactive.

Renko is pure "old Russia" -- gloomy, ironic, and complicated. He's a widower now -- his wife died of an allergic reaction to a drug. So we meet a shattered man, still attractive without knowing it, whose forensic nose remains intact. He possesses an acute, intuitive intelligence and is a sly, relentless hunter. He's also honest, which makes him a dangerous man. Renko rose through the ranks on his investigative acumen and a surname burnished by his father, an important general.

He has no life beyond his job and lives on his meager salary. Consider his apartment: "Arkady's view was not of sleek Mercedeses but of a backyard row of metal garages, each secured by a padlock covered by the cutoff bottom of a plastic soda bottle."

Cut to Pripyat, the ghost city next to the Chernobyl nuclear reactors in Ukraine, scene in 1986 of the world's worst nuclear disaster. One reactor exploded, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere and killing thousands. (The figures are hotly disputed.) The government response, we learn, was scandalous.