The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Дебютант (Untraceable). This is a story inspired by but not based on the Salisbury poisonings when Russian agents used the nerve agent Novichok to try and kill a former Russian double agent and his daughter. This novel tells of a scientist who develops a similar agent, called Neophyte in this book and Debutant in the Russian original but finds that the failing Soviet Union and its Russian successor seem uninterested so he defects but finds to his horror that the West is not interested either. He is living in a small town in Austria but has plans to find a country that may be interested. At the same time we follow a pair of Russian agents who have been sent to kill him, but things go somewhat wrong for them. Lebedev gives us an excellent portrait of the obsessive scientist and of the dutiful Russian agent who will do whatever his bosses tell him to do.