BOOK REVIEW / A little knowledge of some dangerous things: 'Darkness at Dawn' - John Hands: HarperCollins, 14.99 pounds

THIS is a book that makes a reader uneasy. The unease derives not from any subtleties of style or construction - there are none - but from the fact that the author appears to know more than your average thriller writer might reasonably be expected to know about rivalries between the republics of the former Soviet Union in general and about their nuclear weapons in particular.

It will be giving little away to say that the plot concerns Russia's ambition to render Ukraine a non-nuclear power, Ukraine's determination to prevent that, and the readiness of both to press the nuclear button as a last resort. Even that bare outline, however, suggests the topicality and strategic plausibility of this novel.

In the month since it was published, Ukraine has declared all nuclear weapons on its territory to be the property of Ukraine, Russia has objected, the Black Sea fleet has been divided between the two republics - then undivided when the Russian officers objected - and the Russian parliament has laid claim to the highly militarised region of Sevastopol, a move that both the Ukrainian and Russian presidents have denounced. Here is surely evidence enough that cold wars, and the spies who thrive in them, do not die, they merely change location.

Painful though it is for me to admit this, Darkness at Dawn has its merits. Cliche-ridden it may be, stylistically primitive, with cardboard cut outs for characters, sex scenes that would not be out of place in a creative-writing manual and a plot whose baroque complexities offer more confusion than intrigue, nonetheless it is a rip-roaring read and the suspense is sustained to the very last couple of pages. It contains little to make the professional Russia or Ukraine-watcher cringe. The personal names are mostly possible, the transcriptions consistent, the place names and descriptions hold good.

But perhaps the chief merit of Darkness at Dawn is the authenticity of the views expressed by the main characters: the out-and-out Russian imperialist, Nikolai Krasin, angry that Russia has 'lost' the Soviet empire and heaping the blame on the new democratic regime; the Ukrainian nationalist, Roman Bondar, who never dreamt his country would gain its independence and who cannot cope with the realities of power; his clearer-sighted daughter, Maria, who has grasped that her father's day is past; the 'honest' Russians, who understand Ukraine's striving for nationhood, and the vacillating, but eventually honourable hero, Taras Stepaniak, who tries to save the two sides from each other.

For me, however, as a sometime foreign correspondent, there are two special sources of unease. One is Hands's account (which rings true) of how easily the western media can be used by the local intelligence services to discredit whomever they want discredited. 'Fascism. It was the old standby, but it never failed,' the hero Stepaniak is made to say early on, before he plants a story to blacken the reputation of Ukrainian emigres.

The other is the depiction of Chrystia Lesyn, described by one of her colleagues as 'part-time journalist, full-time opportunist'. Two-dimensional Chrystia is desperate for a scoop in her newly independent homeland - so desperate that she willingly hobnobs with the local intelligence agents, sleeps with her sources after the most fleeting of introductions and knowingly trades information with them.

Nor is Chrystia alone in this new genre of post-Cold War fiction. She has a marginally more principled, cleverer, though no more chaste, counterpart in 'Charlie', the bilingual American correspondent in Robert Harris's acclaimed Fatherland.

So that is what they think of us out there in the big wide world of thriller-writing, is it? Now, at least, we know.