"In Russia there are no business stories," declares one character in this punchy debut set in Moscow, where its author worked for three years as a correspondent for the Economist. "And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories." This would have been news to Tolstoy and Chekhov. But times have changed, and Russia's position on the world stage is such that you can say whatever you like about it, thanks to a widespread willingness to believe the very worst.

This is a crime story, as its title suggests: "snowdrop" is Moscow slang for a corpse concealed by snow, revealed when the thaw comes. At the start, though, the narrator, Nicholas, is naive enough to think it might be a love story. The plot charts this generic migration, his downscaling of hopes and ambitions, with chilling efficiency. You wonder how his wife-to-be feels. Snowdrops takes the form of a confessional letter to her, saying, in effect: "This is what I did. This is what I allowed myself to become. Do you still want to marry me?" Miller doesn't tell us, but I'm guessing her answer was no.

It's boomtime in the mid-noughties, and Nicholas is an expat lawyer working on behalf of foreign banks that want to lend money to Russian businesses, especially in the oil industry. In his own words, his job is smearing "lipstick on a pig" – sanitising dodgy deals with covenants and sureties no one involved will respect anyway. He has money to spend, so he enjoys Moscow's exotic decadence. He's 38 and rudderless, terrified of suburbia and of ending up in a boring, loveless marriage like his parents'.

One day, travelling home on the metro, he fights off a mugger, "a noble deed in a ruthless place". The intended victim was not him but Masha, an alluring femme fatale who is invariably accompanied by her younger sister, Katya. Masha and Nicholas become an item – he genuinely thinks he's in love – but it's obvious he's been caught in some type of honey-trap. The question is: which type?

Miller contrasts hard, cold Masha and slutty Katya – predators tidily symbolic of the new Russia and its discontents – with the woman they introduce to Nicholas as their aunt. Tatiana Vladimirovna is an old babushka living in a plush (by Moscow standards) grace-and-favour apartment that was her late husband's reward for services to the motherland. She spent her childhood making skis out of bark and laying down bottles of pickles for winter. But her craving for a return to this pastoral idyll will be her undoing.

Snowdrops is both a very good novel and a slightly disappointing one. Good, because the writing has tremendous pace and energy. (For all Nicholas's faults, he's amusing, compellingly honest company.) Disappointing, because it adds little to what we already know about life in Putin's Russia: the cascading vulgarity of elitny shops and restaurants; the flesh bars with their painted girls and dwarves in tiger-stripe thongs; the top-to-bottom corruption; the gangsters. This isn't to say Snowdrops never brings us news, just that it's equally happy reinforcing negative stereotypes and flinging casual racial abuse. For example: "[Russians] could wallow in mud and vodka for a decade, then conjure up a skyscraper or execute a royal family in an afternoon."

Some characters feel as if they've wandered in from a Bond film – for instance, the man known only as "the Cossack", the devilish impetus behind an oil project Nicholas is working on. Even Masha is a standard-issue Asiatic temptress in the mould of Irina from Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, to the memorable opening chapter of which – the discovery of three faceless, fingerless "snowdrops" – Miller pays due homage in his own.

At one point Nicholas says of Masha that she believed "people and their actions were somehow separate – as if you could just bury whatever you did and forget about it". Snowdrops is a properly moral riposte to that attitude; a powerful warning of the dangers of staring at something so long that you stop noticing what you're seeing.