The Yiddish Policemen's Union

TITLE: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

AUTHOR: Michael Chabon

In Chabon's alternate history, the Jewish country of Israel doesn't exist, and Jewish refugees escaping from the Holocaust are granted the safety and autonomy of a strip of Alaska. Now 60 years later, the Jewish land of Sitka is about to revert back to the United States. That's the background against which a Jewish policeman, living in a fleabag hotel, ends up investigating the murder of another tenant of the hotel.

Still reeling from his divorce a couple of years earlier the more recent death of his sister, and faced with an uncertain future after the reversion, Meyer Landsman is a mess, but he's a good detective, determined to find the killer, even if it means disobeying a direct order from his newly promoted ex-wife who is now his boss.

In prose full of metaphors and similies, Chabon takes Meyer and the reader into the part of Sitka where the Black Hats -- ultra Orthodox Jews -- live and oversee life in the district. The simple murder of a former chess prodigy/current drug addict is anything but simple. This is a fascinating look at what could have been, as well as a compelling story about a murder, grief, and a community determined to keep surviving all the obstacles put in their way.  

Underground Airlines

TITLE: Underground Airlines
AUTHOR: Ben H. Winters

The title isn't literal. It refers to the modern equivalent of the underground railroad that sneaked escaped slaves from the American south to freedom in the north. In the alternate reality Winters imagines, Lincoln was assassinated before he took office, compromise prevented the Civil War, and in the present there remain the Hard Four states where slavery is still legal. Victor is an escaped slave who's been forced to work with the US Marshals to hunt down other escaped slaves. All Victor cares about is himself. All he wants is to remain free, or the semblance of freedom that marks his life, the ability to move around the non-slave states, staying in nice hotels, eating good food, and trying to not think about the tracker inbedded in his spine. But his latest case, to find a runaway slave called Jackdaw who reportedly is hiding in Indianapolis turns out to not be the routine assignment he'd thought, and the things he learns cause him to question what he knows about the country and himself.

This novel works on many levels, but mostly, it's a personal journey for Victor and an incredibly relevant commentary on the state of the US today. The provocative title caught my attention in the bookstore, the blurb made me buy it, and the words inside lead me to highly recommend it.