A Very Expensive Poison

In November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko drank tea laced with polonium 210 in a London hotel and died three weeks later. Luke Harding follows the radioactive trail the killers left across the city, through the British inquiry that named the assassins, and up the chain to the Kremlin. The absurd incompetence of the plot sits alongside its chilling audacity, and Harding uses the case to show how Russian state power operates abroad. It reads like a spy novel except that every detail is documented.