The blurb of this book reads: "Professor Kalitin is a ruthless, narcissistic chemist who has developed an untraceable, extremely lethal poison called Neophyte while working in a secret city on an island in the Russian far east. When the Soviet Union collapses, he defects and is given a new identity in Germany. After an unrelated Russian is murdered with Kalitin's poison, his cover is blown and he's drawn into the German investigation of the death. Two special forces killers with a lot of Chechen blood on their hands are sent to silence him – using his own undetectable poison. Their journey to their target is full of blunders, mishaps, holdups and accidents."

As someone who reads a lot of crime fiction and thrillers, and someone who is very interested in politics and current affairs, I really, really, really wanted to like this book. It sounded perfect for me. Unfortunately though, I just couldn’t. I don’t know if it’s the translation or just the author wanted to write in a literary style, but I found this book plodding and dull. I’m perfectly happy for characters to self-reflect, but here the self-reflections go on for pages and pages and pages. What promised to be a great story was weighed down and saggy.

Vyrin, a Russian defector, is discovered and fatally poisoned by secret service agents. Kalitin, a 70-year old chemist who also had escaped to the West after the collapse of the USSR and now lives a secluded life in the former GDR, is invited to join the investigative team. The choice is unsurprising: Kalitin was one of the Soviet Union’s top experimental scientists and the developer of Neophyte, an “untraceable” terribly lethal poison. But someone leaks information about Kalitin’s involvement in the Vyrin inquiry, and the Russian authorities, newly apprised of his whereabouts decide to silence him. Ruthless military officer Shershnev is dispatched with a colleague on a mission to kill Kalitin using the very same poison developed by the chemist in his USSR days.

Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable has the trappings of a spy thriller and is not short of incident – there is a harrowing and exciting description of a hunt for lab monkeys after an experiment gone wrong, as well as a quasi-farcical account of the assassins’ trip to the sleepy village where Kalitin hides. However, the novel’s focus is on the psychological and moral make-up of the protagonists, both of them cynical, single-minded tools of the regime. On the one hand there is Kalitin, who defected out of disappointment at the fall of the USSR rather than out of any sense of guilt or moral duty, and who, now diagnosed with cancer, dreams of a return to his past in the lab. On the other hand there is Shershnev, a human killing machine, who has trained himself to subsume any feelings which can get in the way of a mission.

Untraceable largely shifts between the points of view of these two characters. Towards the end, however, Lebedev introduces another player in the dramatis personae: Travniček, a pastor who has had past brushes with the Soviet secret service, and who provides a ray of hope and redemption in an otherwise bleak worldview. By his own account, Travniček is neither hero nor saint, but in this moral swampland, his valiant attempts to do right by his parishioners – including Kalitin – makes of him a character worthy of a Graham Greene novel.

Lebedev’s novel, partly inspired by the Skripal case, is topical and engaging. The cover of the edition I read, portraying a shadowy figure shrouded in mist, seems to reflect the ethical ambiguity of the world in which the novel’s characters work and live. The exquisite English translation by Antonina W. Bouis is not only readable and idiomatic, whilst retaining a lyrical and poetic feel.

Untraceable is a fact meets fiction intellectual thriller inspired by the Russian government's proclivity to poison its political enemies and in particular by the near-fatal poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, Wiltshire in 2018. At its centre is a ruthless 70-year-old chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. When he was younger, his father had been under the employ of a mysterious figure known only as Uncle Igor in a city now known officially as Sovetsk-22, where a top-secret scientific facility was based and in which important and highly covert projects would take place. Owing to Igor, Kalitin becomes a chemist and his most devoted disciple. The remote laboratory was situated in the depths of gloomy dungeons dug under the massive citadel of a former monastery. The monks were expelled after World War I and the Revolution, and the Island became the ideal site for a secret military range where Soviet and German scientists could conduct joint chemical weapons testing. It becomes Kalitin’s mission in life to find a drug that can kill instantly and perfectly, leaving no trace. After much trial and error, he ends up developing Neophyte, a deadly neurotoxin and his biggest accomplishment as a chemist. In 1991, Kalitin decided to defect to the West carrying the Neophyte in a special container disguised as a bottle of cologne hoping to be able to carry on his laboratory work in the former German Democratic Republic as the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse.

He settles down in a house on the outskirts of a small town and works as a chemical weapons investigator having been given a whole new identity. Meanwhile, one fine summer day, an elderly gentleman, a Russian émigré, dies in the garden of a bustling restaurant in a small European town. Regular customer Vyrin, or Mr Mikhalsky according to his passport, has always avoided areas where the view is impeded. On that day, however, the only place free was an end table by the hedging. The sudden injection feels just like a bee sting, but Vyrin turns round to see a man getting into a car with a non-local number plate. He realises that after almost thirty years the avenging sword of the Russian secret services has finally caught up with the fugitive traitor. From his days working in intelligence, he knows how many documents will have been filed away, capturing every movement, the entire life of a surveillance target. His total change of appearance, the reclusive lifestyle, the plastic surgery and the new biodata have clearly been of no avail. They have managed to track him down. In his final minute of life, Vyrin manages to whisper to the waiter, "This is an assassination. They've poisoned me." The case would have been closed without further investigation had the waiter not been an ex-police officer. Much to the chagrin of the two Soviet-era generals following the events from Moscow, the pathologists find traces of a mysterious highly toxic poison.

Three of the international chemical warfare experts called in to investigate are well-known to the generals. But as for the fourth... Was it not that same scientist Kalitin, inventor of the deadly chemical agent codenamed Debutant? A defector, traitor and a dangerous enemy who knew too much. It was high time they got rid of him. The present-day Russian regime sets its sights on him. Lieutenant Colonel Shershnev, a war-battered special forces operative, is tasked with taking Kalitin out in his German exile, eventually setting out with a colleague, technician Major Grebenyuk, in what turns out to be an overly elaborate plan to get to the man who abandoned his motherland. The narrative seamlessly shifts back and forth between fascinating protagonist Kalitin and his story and that of Shershnev and Grebenyuk before the two threads converge and an exhilarating and enthralling game of cat and mouse ensues between the hunters and the hunted. I enjoyed the amalgamation of historical fact embellished with fictional characters, and I was riveted from beginning through to denouement. Untraceable is undoubtedly a tour de force and up there with the likes of le Carré for solid, believable and exceptionally thrilling literary spy fiction. It moves at a rapid pace and the ever-mutating story keeps you intrigued and excited throughout with a breezy effortlessness. Written in exquisite prose it hurtles along building up the suspense until palpable and showcases a complex, timely and multilayered plot — almost akin to Matryoshka dolls. Highly recommended.