Wolves eat dogs - Martin Cruz Smith

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 . . .

Pasha Ivanov, one of Russia's richest oligarchs, is lying dead on the pavement outside his luxury high-rise apartment in Moscow. His death, it seems, is a straightforward case of suicide. Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, however, has never been one to take evidence at face value and there's something puzzling him that he simply refuses to ignore: a mountain of salt found in Ivanov's wardrobe . . .

Renko's 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. When the body of Lev Timofeyev, Pasha Ivanov's former research partner, is discovered in a contaminated cemetery, it is only the beginning of Renko's journey into this labyrinthine netherworld of crime - and an investigation that is about to uncover some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets.