Debutant is an ideal poison, deadly and without a trace. The chemist who created it, Kalitin, worked in a secret Soviet institute, but with the collapse of the Union he fled to the West. Lieutenant Colonel Shershnev receives an order to poison a traitor with his own invention... The new, fifth, novel by Sergei Lebedev is an artistic exploration of poison as a tool of Soviet and Russian intelligence services, twisted into a spy plot. And - brilliant prose about eternal themes: the nature of evil and good, the connection between the creator and creation, science and morality. The novel has already been published in Poland, the Czech Republic and is being prepared for publication in the USA, England, Germany and other countries.