THE LITVINENKO FILE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A RUSSIAN SPY, by Martin Sixsmith, St. Martin's Press, 312 pages, $24.95

Recently, the British government formally charged Andrei Lugovoi, a former Russian KGB operative, with the murder of another former KGB officer, Alexander V. Litvinenko, by administering polonium poisoning — tantamount to internal radiation.

Thus far, the Russians, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, have refused to allow extradition of the accused to London for trial.

"The Litvinenko File" is about the title agent's life and death, a thoroughly intriguing detective story tracing Litvinenko's decision to leave Russia and defect to England, through his public, vituperative criticisms of Putin and his repressive regime, until he was finally poisoned to die a slow and horrible death over 28 days last November.

Why polonium poisoning? Perhaps to make the killing highly publicized around the world as a warning to other defectors that Russia can track them down anywhere.

The author, Martin Sixsmith, is a British native and Oxford graduate who also obtained graduate degrees from Harvard and the Sorbonne. For almost two decades he was employed by the BBC as an international correspondent stationed in Moscow, Washington, Brussels and Warsaw.

Sixsmith performed an impressive search for people and evidence that would help him discover the killer — and finally concluded that it was done by one of a few Russians whom he named — but not under direct order of Putin.

However, Litvinenko, while hospitalized, accused Putin of ordering his murder, which, if true, would be the first time a Russian defector has been punished while living in a country other than Russia.

Before his poisoning, Litvinenko had became a very public enemy of the current Russian regime. For several months he had been actively investigating the murder in Russia of Anna Politkovskaya, a noted journalist who was gunned down in a contract killing in Moscow in fall 2006.

Politkovskaya had been writing for several years about Putin's repressive government and had been especially distressed by the 2005 school siege in Beslan, when the Putin government was most actively involved in military aggression in Chechnya. Politkovskaya's "A Russian Diary" was completed before her death and has just been published by Random House.

Sixsmith interviewed Andrei Negrasov and Yuri Felshtinsky, both key Russian operatives who understand KGB protocol. But his most important interview was with Boris Berezovsky, a friend of Litvinenko's and also a hated enemy of Putin's government.

Berezovsky was close to the top of the government at the time Putin assumed power — so some sources speculate that Berezovsky's defection made him a bigger prize for Russian assassins than Litvinenko. Maybe, they said, Litvinenko was like "Trotsky's dog," a term dating back to the Stalin era when people close to Stalin protege Leon Trotsky were assassinated as a way to scare Trotsky.

Although Sixsmith has chosen not to accuse Putin directly for the murder, he has narrowed the list of potential killers to a handful that include Andrei Lugovoi, the man now charged by the British. Perhaps that is why Sixsmith could not be located by his publisher over a period of three weeks so that I could interview him.

The author appears to have gone into hiding — suggesting that he may have made himself into a "Trotsky's Dog" by writing this book.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com