Nick Platt is a British corporate lawyer working in Moscow during the oil-boom years of Putin’s Russia. When he meets a beautiful young woman on the metro, he becomes increasingly entangled with her and her family — until it becomes clear that nothing and no one in his new world is quite what they appeared.

Miller’s debut is a slick and atmospheric thriller written as a confessional letter from Nick to his fiancée back in England, explaining how things went so wrong. Moscow in winter — the grey slush, the oligarchs, the barely concealed menace — is vividly rendered, and the novel’s central metaphor (a “snowdrop” is a corpse that emerges from the snow in spring, preserved since the previous autumn) gives it a bleak, elegant framing.

The weakness is Nick himself, who is too passive and too moral to be interesting and too compromised to be sympathetic. But as a portrait of a city — and of what happens to people who tell themselves they’re just playing along — it’s quietly effective. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.