Toxic

Untraceable
Sergei Lebedev

This is a tightly written and cold-hearted literary suspense novel, based on something close to real life. The two protagonists/ antagonists– the Russian chemist-defector Kalitin and the Russian agent-assassin Shershnev– are on a collision course. Along the way, we learn their back stories. Do we come to understand what makes them tick? Hard to say. Comparisons of the book to Le Carré's moral universe have been made, but unlike Smiley, neither Kalitin nor Shershnev seems to have a moral bone in his body, and what emotion or empathy they possess is buried so deep in their psyches as to be nearly snuffed out.

The book actually has a third protagonist: the neurotoxin Neophyte, designed by Kalitin to be lethal and "untraceable," a cousin of the real-world novichok. Neophyte has its own personal history, paralleling Kalitin's as well as Russia's. The stories of these three toxic characters are compellingly told, and the descriptions of the landscape and action are vivid and artful. Thank the translator, Antonina W. Bouis, as well as Lebedev for that. A good read about awful stuff for bad times.