Donald James Knihy

The Arctic city of Murmansk, capital of the Kola region of north Russia, early in the new century. Inspector Constantin Vadim is back in his home town after a short and nearly catastrophic appointment in Moscow. But now he is faced with a frightening personal challenge: one night his young wife, Natalya, a doctor, answers an emergency medical call -twelve hours later she still hasn't come back. An accident seems the first possibility. Or even a lover. Yet soon a more terrifying answer begins to emerge as Vadim's desperate investigation reveals that a second missing woman, an American consular official, was abducted on the same night. Frustrated by the strange twists and contradictions in the case, Vadim surrenders to the dark power of Russian myth and prophecy. But he is linked in uneasy parnership with a black FBI woman, seconded from Moscow. Locked in a clash of cultures, the ill-balanced pair must confront an abductor who is at once deviously clever and bafflingly deranged.

Russia in the early twenty-first century: a civil war has subsided into an uneasy peace; police inspector Constantin Vadim is transferred from Murmansk to head an investigation in a crime-ridden Moscow district. His task: to solve a succession of brutal murders committed by a killer who has become a terrifying local legend: The Monstrum. But Vadim has never investigated a murder. The real reason for his transfer is his uncanny resemblance to the new vice-president, Koba - Vadim is his double. Why has he been given the impossible mission to find The Monstrum? Is the case linked to the new government? Vadim finds himself on the bloodstained social fringe of Moscow and the very centre of the new Russia - a position which attracts the attention of his estranged wife, Julia Petrovna, a general in the defeated Anarchist army. Her capture would be a high prize for the men who run Vadim's life. And as Vadim pursues The Monstrum these two worlds move inexorably closer to one another, threatening both to crush the inspector before he can capture the killer and the emerging democracy before it is fully formed.

In this, the third appearance of Inspector Constantin Vadim leaves his native Russia for New York. Vadim finds himself caught up in the middle of a presidential election where the victory of the leading candidate is threatened by the outrageous public behaviour of his Russian wife. When someone decides the only solution is to have her killed before she loses her husband the election Constantin's innocent involvement with her pitches him straight into the middle of a murder investigation.

Wien, Paris, Berlin, London, Singapur, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles - sie alle definieren 'die Stadt' in unserer Vorstellungswelt. James Donald begleitet uns auf einer inneren Reise zu diesen Stätten, die Künstler, Schriftsteller, Architekten und Filmemacher durch Jahrhunderte hindurch inspiriert haben. Er zeigt uns, wie Künstler und Kritiker wie Virginia Woolf, Walther Ruttmann und Friedrich Engels die Stadt als Ort der Eitelkeiten, des Elends und des Unrechts, aber auch als Verkörperung der höchsten Aspirationen menschlicher Kultur betrachtet haben. Indem er die kulturellen und politischen Auswirkungen städtischer Vorstellungswelten analysiert, kommt Donald zu dem Schluss, dass die imaginierte Stadt nach wie vor die geeignetste Brille für die Zukunft eines demokratischen Gemeinwesens darstellt. Dieses Buch zieht darüber hinaus in Betracht, wie Künstler die städtische Umwelt durch das Erschaffen öffentlichen Raums, durch Architektur und Skulptur geformt haben - künstlerische Ausdrucksweisen, die dazu beitragen, unsere Vorstellung von Raum im städtischen Umfeld zu bestimmen. Stadtplaner und Architekten wie Otto Wagner, Le Corbusier und Bernard Tschumi konfrontieren uns mit realen und vorstellbaren Stadtformen und werden damit wegweisend für alternative Sozialformen der Zukunft.