Russian cop Arkady Renko prowls the apartment of one of the men who has done well out of privatization and neo-capitalism and has suddenly jumped out of a tenth floor window The dead man's cupboard is full of salt and he was clutching a salt-shaker when he died No-one wants to investigate madness, but Renko suspects that there is more to it than that When the dead man's partner turns up with his throat cut in a cemetery in the Ukraine, his bosses get him out of their hair by sending him to investigate - in the overgrown deserted towns and returning woodlands around the radioactive ruins of the Chernobyl power plant