The only thing that prevented this book from being a DNF was that I was genuinely curious how far the author would take this self-insert fantasy. This is basically your early aughts uncle who read the Da Vinci code while between wives and decided he could do it one better. You have your impossibly attractive Harvard professor who can speak all languages (M), a spunky English journalist (F), an impossibly competent Russian police inspector who is probably the real protagonist (F), and a comic relief guy (M). Things play out almost exactly as you would expect, no real subversions or deviations. There are some gems in there too, a highlight being the description of a mixed Black-German professor as demonstrating "the clear superiority of that genetic combination". This could almost have been a parody of this type of book but fell just shy.