A.N. Wilson buries himself in crime fiction from Russia to Los Angeles, via Venice, Tokyo and London

The title of Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable (Apollo, £18.99; Tablet price £17.09) could refer to the fact that the sinister scientist who pioneered the poison “Neophyte” has himself undergone plastic surgery, and is hoping against hope that his former KGB colleagues, and the inter­national police, will not trace him to his German exile. But it could equally well apply to the poison itself: “Neophyte was weak because of its strength. It left no trace and was lethal but too unstable as a chemical. Too lethal and therefore not viable.” Very, very occasionally, but not often, the chemist Professor Kalitin has moral qualms about what he has done with his life. But then, these people do not really go in for moral qualms. And when we learn that two Russian officers, with the most appalling record of atrocities perpetrated during the Chechen war, are on his trail with a phial of a deadly substance, we are not surprised. The only decent person in the story is a priest who has been so hideously defaced by the poison that he has been exiled to a faraway place so as not to horrify his former parishioners with his lizard-like complexion. This is a parable of Putin’s Russia, with memories stretching back into the era of Stalin and Hitler, with the searing awareness that no moral progress has been made since those days of horror. Spellbinding.