An otherwise intriguing account of a train trip through Central Asia is marred by careless, overwrought prose.

Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing
By Jeffrey Tayler
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2009; Hardcover; 320 pages; $24.00

From its tongue-twister of a title to the impossibly flowery language that permeates the narrative, Murderers in Mausoleums is an awkward book that trips up on its own considerable promise. Jeffrey Tayler begins with a bold notion: that the Central Asian mountain ranges and steppes, first conquered by Genghis Khan, then subsumed by the Soviet Union, and now caught in a tug-of-war between Russia and China, are a cauldron where volatile elements — Islamic terrorism, oil money, drug shipments — are colliding at dangerous speeds. “Across Eurasia,” Tayler warns, “alliances are forming that may soon threaten Western security.”

To discover the dangers and charms of Central Asia, which have been romanticized by the likes of Pushkin and Lermontov, Tayler travels by train from his home city of Moscow to Beijing. The result falls somewhere between a travelogue and serious investigative journalism, without committing fully to either. That said, Tayler, who has also written extensively on Africa’s more treacherous domains, knows how to find a good story. From the proud Don Cossacks, who want their own autonomous region in southern Russia, to “the planet’s farthest-inland aquarium,” the Duman Oceanarium, in the middle of dusty Kazakhstan, Tayler diligently seeks out the signs of ruin left in the Soviet Union’s wake. Signs of prosperity are much more rare, and usually come in the form of strip clubs, several of which the author appears to have visited in the name of journalism. He finds many residents eager to share their frustration with the jigsaw-puzzle politics of Central Asia, like an ethnic Uyugur living in China who pleads with him, “Liberate us, just like you liberated Iraq!”

But the excitement of a journey down the byways of a fallen empire is bogged down at every turn by careless, sloppy writing that begs for an editor’s merciless strokes. A “smoky, dim rathskeller” of a bar on one page becomes a “smoky, hot rathskeller” on the next, and Tayler often settles for trite images like “Dante-less desert hell” and “bloody tides of history” that reduce Russia and its poor cousins to facile stereotypes. He also has a habit of excerpting lengthy conversations that, while they arguably hew to the tenets of realism, make for tedious reading.

Murderers in Mausoleums (Hardcover) [Amazon]