Author(s): Martin Cruz Smith

Crime Thriller Mystery

The stunning new novel featuring Inspector Arkady Renko by the author of Gorky Park.

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 oligarchs - 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 . . .