Amazon.com Review
'Why would anyone jump out a window with a saltshaker?' A good question, especially when the suicide victim is Pasha Ivanov, a Moscow physicist-turned-billionaire businessman-a 'New Russian' poster boy, if ever there was one-with several homes, a leggy 20-year-old girlfriend ('the kind [of blonde] who could summon the attention of a breeze'), and every reason to be contented in his middle age. So, wonders Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, in Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, what provoked Ivanov to take a header from his stylish 10th-floor apartment? And how does it relate to the shaker clutched in his dead hand or the hillock of table salt found on his closet floor?
Renko, introduced in Smith's 1981 bestseller, Gorky Park, is a cop well out of sync with rapidly...