Donald James' writing credentials include episodes of The Avengers, The Saint and Mission: Impossible, as well as The Penguin Dictionary Of The Third Reich. He brings his instinct for entertainment and the same breadth of subject to Monstrum, a serial-killer/police novel which is really about the Russian people and their need to escape their haunted past. If this seems confused, it's not. Inspector Constantin Vadim, the womanizer, drinker, and narrator, is assigned to investigate the mutilation slayings of women in the Moscow of 2015. He isn't ordered there only because of his abilities as a policeman, but because he can double as a lookalike for the new vice president, a resemblance which has its political uses. The plot tends to twist a little too often, but James is a master of characterization and place, and that gives the story its real power. Every person in this book is as real as the next, and James' Russia is as real, dark, and conflicted as the one we know so little about today. Monstrum is a mystery novel on its face, but like other good Western thrillers about Russia, the real intrigue is that murky, strangely familiar country itself.