– Martin Cruz Smith writes an absolutely terrific thriller about global crime & espionage. The story is a page-turner that is packed with colorful characters and a great story. What I found most fascinating about this book was the setting in Moscow, Kiev, and Chernobyl. The last location, particularly, really is quite a gem. How the author creates life out of a part of the globe that is taken by many to be a radioactive wasteland. But life goes on.
Martin Cruz Smith makes a strong case for the underworld of survivors and predators that exist here. Definitely captures the imagination.

– Searching for the reason behind a mysterious suicide, Arkady Renko ends up in the radioactive zone around Chernobyl.
Like the author's earlier works, this novel transcends its mystery-thriller genre in its quality. Smith has a perfect eye for the telling detail, the understated comment. The novel's dark, ironic, threatening mood, with its flashes of light in which human interaction defies death, never falters.
At times, the plot meanders, and here and there it drops a beat. However, the story's other good qualities make up for that. In particular, the "villain", despite committing the heinous crime of a long dialogue infodump explaining what he did and how and why, after which he of course intends to shoot the progagonist, is interesting because to many readers, including myself, his motivations won't seem villainous at all. For the most part, this novel avoids the obvious and demonstrates a mastery of brutally effective understatement.

– I think this is the best work that Smith has done. It is difficult to classify. The first 1/3 is a very good thriller. Then we get to the aftermath of Chernobyl and everything changes. The characters, landscape, and reflections on the Chernobyl disaster dominate the book, take it above the whodunit level in my view. The whodunit drives the plot, the attempts on Renko's life etc. but after a while who cares who killed Ivanov? At the end Smith cleans up the loose ends in a workmanlike fashion but Chernobyl is what stays long after the book is closed.
As usual the quality of Smith's writing is very good, "Bobby Hoffman was a mollusk without its shell, a tender American morsel on the Russian ocean floor.", "To vodka, the first line of radiation defense." "...the pickles crisp and sour, with perhaps a hint of strontium." and so on. I can see where some readers, expecting a thriller, were dissapointed, I was not.