A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West -- Luke Harding, Paperback

A true story of murder and conspiracy that points directly to Vladimir Putin, by The Guardian's former Moscow bureau chief and author of The Snowden Files and Collusion

On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium--a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance.

Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story--complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters. He shows how Litvinenko's murder foreshadowed the killings of other Kremlin critics, from Washington, DC, to Moscow, and how these are tied to Russia's current misadventures in Ukraine and Syria. In doing so, he becomes a target himself and unearths a chain of corruption and death leading straight to Vladimir Putin. F

rom his investigations of the downing of flight MH17 to the Panama Papers, Harding sheds a terrifying light on Russia's fracturing relationship with the West.

Author: Luke Harding
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01/24/2017
Pages: 480
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781101973998

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2016
Booklist 12/01/2016 pg. 12
Library Journal 12/01/2016 pg. 109
Publishers Weekly 12/19/2016

About the Author

Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.