A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West
Luke Harding
Jan 2017 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith
3.0star
1 review
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13 hr 12 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
3.0
1 review
Jan Kurš
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July 25, 2023
Interesting in the beginning, but starts to feel repetitive after some without much progress in the story. Just retelling the same story from different perspectives.
About the author
Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria. 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. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize) and The Snowden Files. Two of Harding's books have been made into films; The Fifth Estate and Snowden.
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