Wolves Eat Dogs

Cynical, quietly subversive, brilliantly analytical and haunted by melancholy, Arkady Renko is one of the iconic detectives of contemporary fiction. He has survived, barely, the journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find his transformed nation just as obsessed with secrecy, corruption and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship. In his most baffling case yet, Renko enters the privileged world of Russia's new billionaire class. The grandest of them all, Pasha Ivanov, has apparently leapt to his death from the palatial splendor of his Moscow condominium. There are no signs pointing to homicide, but there is one puzzling bit of in Ivanov's closet is a mountain of salt.