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Michael Charon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a ‘police procedural’ with a difference. In fact, a lot of differences.

In  gloomy Sitka, Alaska, the enclave set aside to shelter Jews after the failure of the Jewish state to survive in 1948, moves, after 60 years of existence to ‘Reversion’. it is to be re-integrated within the USA.

Landsman, the failing detective (and, of course, member of the Yiddish Policemen’s Union) with a failed marriage, rooms in a crummy downtown hotel. Thus he is on the spot when one of his down-and-out neighbours is apparently murdered.

Who is he? Why was he shot? What does the chess game set up on his table mean? When Landsman fails to investigate the shaft in the hotel basement, we know it’s a mistake. He and his partners go on making mistakes and worrying away at the case in what will be to many readers an unfamiliar but intriguing social structure: a transplanted Jewish society.

Almost nothing is what it seems, from the dentist’s models to the unusual cow Landsman spots in a field at a remote drug rehab centre.

The chessboard is, of course, eventually explained.

Charon is a Pulitzer Prize winner with his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This 2007 novel, which won the Nebula Award, lives up to his reputation.

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