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Nadelson's already good series about Russian-American cop Artie Cohen keeps getting better. This one moves beyond a mere cop novel to become a gripping, state-of-our-new-world novel. The cop part has Artie seeking the killer of his close friend's daughter; the novel part brilliantly illuminates the dark new world in which we've been living since Putin, with Russian billionaires spilling out across the world like an indelible moral stain. Starting in New York, moving to the rich Russian ghetto around London's Moscow Road, and surging on inevitably to Moscow itself, Londongrad immerses you – dunks you and holds you down – in a slurry of misused wealth, unpunished crime and grim revenge. Russia has changed but its past has not been dealt with. The ghosts have not been satisfied.

Nadelson's prose is impatient and pared down, her eye is sharp. (Pity the same can't be said for Atlantic's proof-reader.) She knows her hero and his world, and she convinces us of her intimacy with a world most of us only read about in the newspapers – and reading is about as close as you should go. Why not start here?

Russell James

Londongrad

by Reggie Nadelson

Atlantic TPB, £12.99, 978-1-84354-833-1