Monstrum - Softcover

Ace historian Donald James, who wrote the script for the excellent PBS series Russia's War and whose book The Fall of the Russian Empire is a fine guide to recent past events, projects his expertise into the near future to create a chaotic, completely believable landscape of terror and frustration in this memorable thriller. It's 2015, and Russia--racked by civil wars since the fall of the Yeltsin government and its short-lived liberal successors--is under the strong grip of leader Leonid Koba. A melancholy, alcoholic (are there any other kind?), provincial policeman named Vadim is shipped from Murmansk to a bombed-out district of Moscow, ostensibly to investigate the brutal murders of women credited to a demonlike killer called the Monstrum. But what the people in power really want from the increasingly desperate Vadim is something completely different--his resemblance to Koba and his connection to the woman who led the defeated rebels.

"I read Monstrum at warp speed and with real pleasure. It is both a sophisticated thriller and a thought-provoking novel that looks into the future of the most turbulent of countries, Russia."
--Richard North Patterson

"Monstrum is the finest police novel I've read in the last five or six years."
--Jack Higgins

"Monstrum is hot stuff, a stunning read."
--Lionel Davidson, author of Kolymsky Heights

"Donald James has done something rare and intriguing. He sets his story firmly in the serial-killer genre, then turns it on its ear, taking us into a made-up but totally believable world of evil, betrayal, and unlikely heroism. Monstrum is the real thing."
--John Douglas, author of Mindhunter

"Donald James has written a thriller of the very vest kind: haunting, fast-paced, provocative. Monstrum is a superb novel."
--Daniel Silva, author of The Unlikely Spy