Title: From Russia with Tedium
Product review: It is the year 2015, and a post-civil war Russia attempts to build a new democracy and discard centuries of Totalitarianism. Constantin Vadim, a militiaman from Murmansk, is assigned to Moscow as the chief homicide inspector of a destitute and war-torn district of Moscow to take charge of a brutal string of murders of young women by a fiend dubbed the "monstrum". For sure, an unusual and ambitious setting for a serial murder mystery, which historian Donald James tackles in "Monstrum". It is this ambition, however, that fatally flaws what could have been an intriguing novel; there are simply too many plots set in motion and too many messages that James is trying to deliver. Told by Vadim in first person, the all-too-frequent addresses to the reader as "my brothers" becomes tedious. While in the end most of these threads come together, payoff feels contrived, wholly implausible, and ultimately disappointing.
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