Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Wolves Eat Dogs [sound recording] by Martin Cruz Smith


Media/Audio Computer Disk PS3569.M5377 W65 2005
Recommended by: Susan Kraat, Librarian

Martin Cruz Smith’s Wolves Eat Dogs is a very good listen,
even as it is a sobering account of life in post-Chernobyl
Chernobyl, the Zone of Exclusion in the Ukraine commonly
referred to simply as the “Zone.” Detective Arkady Renko
(remember Gorky Park?) travels from Moscow to the Ukraine,
to solve a crime involving Russian gangsters and
radioactive chemicals. Smith describes the criminal world
of Moscow, the new Russian capitalism, and the regional
apocalypse in the Ukraine that remains since the 1986
nuclear meltdown. The despair is tangible and
unrelenting, bearable because of the author’s compelling
prose and bleak sense of humor. Ron McLarty reads with
exactly the right tone and has a clever ear for dialect.

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