I think we’ve all been waiting for another Gorky Park for the atmosphere of that far outshone the plot. Now we have its equal with the backdrop of Chernobyl. The portrayal of the scale of the disaster and its aftermath is mind-numbing. Oh, we have suspected suicide, mysterious informers, more deaths, a fleeting romance, the Russian Mafia and, of course, the weary, cynical, out-of-favour Moscow investigator Renko, but it’s the setting that really steals the show here. The explanation for the killings and how they were carried out could have been more intriguing but my expectations had been roused to such a level that it would have been almost impossible to satisfy them in this truly atmospheric read.
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...So why is Pasha Ivanov - one of Russia's richest oligarch's - lying dead on the pavement outside his luxury high-rise apartment, his death an apparent open-and-shut suicide? Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has never been one to take evidence at face value and when Ivanov's wardrobe is found to be full of salt - and contaminated with radioactive cesium - his 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. But everyone risks their life just by being there...
Martin Cruz Smith’s novels include Gorky Park, Stallion Gate, Polar Star, Red Square, Rose, Havana Bay and Stalin’s Ghost. A recipient of the CWA Gold Dagger for fiction in the UK, he is also two-time winner of the Hammett Prize in the United States. He lives with his wife and children in northern California.
