Monstrum: A Novel - Hardcover

A murder mystery in Russia against the background of a failed rebellion. The protagonist is Constantin Vadim, a detective investigating traffic in human organs. The probe is complicated by political intrigue and Vadim's ex-wife, a rebel general who is seeking his help to leave the country.In Russia in the not-too-distant future, a provincial detective finds himself pitted against a serial killer at the center of a conspiracy of politics and lies

ia, 2015: Nationalist forces have finally defeated the Anarchist rebels, but it is an uneasy peace. Provincial police inspector Constantin Vadim is plucked from backwater Murmansk to head up a murder investigation in the decaying, crime-ridden Red Presnya district of Moscow. His task: to solve a succession of unspeakable crimes committed by a serial killer who has become a terrifying local legend, almost a cult symbol: Monstrum.

In the suspenseful tradition of Gorky Park and Fatherland, Donald James's Monstrum is a political thriller that also features a hunt for a brutal murderer. And, in Inspector Vadim, James has created a cynical but all-too-human hero, who navigates across a Russian terrain at once familiar and frighteningly new.

Vadim unwittingly discovers governmental intrigue and conspiratorial deceptions so terrible they threaten to undermine the revamped Russia. And when his past--in the form of his estranged wife, Julia Petrovna, a general in the defeated Anarchi