The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The premise is a single change to history. In 1940 the United States opens Alaska to Jewish refugees, so the destroyed millions instead arrive in Sitka, and after the new state of Israel collapses in 1948 the settlement becomes the centre of Jewish life on earth: three million people, Yiddish speaking, crowded into a district on a strip of the Alaskan coast that they never owned and are about to lose, because the sixty year lease expires in two months and the land reverts to the United States.

Into this, Meyer Landsman, homicide detective, divorced, drinking, living in a residential hotel where a man has been shot in the head. The dead man was a heroin addict and a chess player, and turns out to have been the son of a Verbover rebbe who runs the pious criminal organisation on the island, and possibly something considerably more significant than that.

Landsman's partner is his half Tlingit cousin, and his commanding officer is his ex wife, and the entire investigation is conducted against the clock of a community's dissolution.

Chabon writes it in hard boiled cadences bent into Yiddish rhythms, present tense throughout, with a simile on nearly every page and jokes running under the grief. Sitka itself is the achievement: the Filipino doughnut shops, the Yiddish slang for a gun, the boundary maps drawn to satisfy a rebbe rather than a surveyor.

Landsman is a genuinely good detective and a wreck, and his marriage, which ended over a decision neither of them can discuss, is the real case.

The plot in the last quarter goes somewhere much larger and more political than the murder implied, taking in a red heifer and American foreign policy, which divides readers sharply.

Around four hundred pages. Best for readers who want a real detective novel that is also a serious act of alternate history.