The Independent’s Moscow correspondent Andrew Osborn reports on BREAKFAST WITH POLONIUM, a spy novel just published in Russia that pulls a Law & Order of sorts – taking the real-like puzzler of Alexander Litvinenko‘s death and turning it into fiction. Exploiting the fact that there are more questions than answers about the case, a husband and wife team that specializes in penning thrillers based on true crimes, reasoned that the Russian public’s curiosity about the murder will see the books fly off the shelves.
The authors, Alexander and Natalya Pankov, put the book together in just over a month, easily outstripping British and Russian investigators who have yet to say who they believe killed Litvinenko by poisoning him with a massive dose of polonium-210 in London. The motive they offer in the novel? Old-fashioned thwarted love. (The article reveals who, what, where, when and why, but they still call those kinds of things spoilers where I come from.) Pankov said he saw nothing unethical about using the case as the backdrop for a work of fiction. “We don’t write anything bad about [Litvinenko],” Pankov told The Moscow Times. “We don’t offend anyone. We changed the name.”