Very readable from beginning to end. It starts out with the narrator recounting the discovery of a body in the thawed snow at the end of a long Moscow winter. The narrator then goes back, in the form of telling all to his soon-to-be-wife, to the beginning of the winter and tells a noirish story of getting entrapped deeper and deeper by two young, attractive Russian "sisters". Because of the framing device, the reader knows that nothing is on the level, that the narrator is being trapped in some scheme, but also that it will end OK for him because he's the one telling the story. And it is hard to believe that the narrator himself in real-time did not realize that nothing was on the level, although it increasingly does dawn on him.

The story itself is simple with no major or unexpected revelations. The interest is in the noirish narration, the depicition of Moscow in the 2000s, the interesting characters of the two young Russian women Masha and Katya, and the narrator himself.