Smith has not lost his knack for distilling telling aspects of a culture into a single phrase: “Evgeny Lysenko, nickname Zhenya, age eleven, looked like an old man waiting at a bus stop”; and: “Didn’t someone say that every great fortune started with a crime? Russia already had over thirty billionaires, more than any other country. That was a lot of crime.”

We begin in Moscow, where the oligarch and thoroughly New Russian, Pasha Ivanov, appears to have taken his life by jumping from a high window. At first Arkady doubts that it was suicide, for there are simply too many inexplicable peculiarities: a huge quantity of salt lies piled up in Ivanov’s apartment, there is salt on the window ledge from which he jumped, and a salt-shaker is found under his corpse in the street. Gradually Arkady comes to a more disturbing conclusion: suicide, yes, but as the result of a demonic form of psychological torture involving an isotope called Cesium 137. It is so radioactive that handling a gram of it for three seconds will kill you. Even its milder form, cesium chloride, will send your dosimeter screaming at 50,000 counts per second. Try looking for this isotope in a pile of salt; even while searching, you are ruining your health. No wonder Ivanov freaked, but who hated him enough to go to such sadistic lengths as to dump 50 kilos of salt in his walk-in closet with a single grain of cesium buried somewhere in the middle of it? And what was he doing with a dosimeter in Moscow in the first place? And why jump when he could simply have run?

When Ivanov’s close associate Timofeyev develops a nose bleed (a sure sign of platelet damage in this toxic context) and is subsequently found dead in the Zone, the trail leading to Chernobyl is too tempting for Arkady to resist, even though the Ukraine is no longer part of the Russian empire and his investigative powers there are strictly limited.

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