"What If" style stories have been one of my favourite genres since that old Marvel series where they asked hard-hitting questions like "What If Captain America was really Thor" or the like. Why the super hero reference you might ask? Let's just say it has a little something to do with Michael Chabon, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning golden age comic book epic, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay.

Chabon's latest is The Yiddish Policemen's Union and costume crimefighters are nowhere to be seen here. Rather, this is a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate reality where following the holocaust, Jewish refugees from Europe are resettled in the Sitka district of Alaska (this scenario is based around an actual proposal by President Franklin Roosevelt). Given a 60 year lease on the land, the story is set in the tense months prior to reversion, when the Jewish lands are set to be returned to the state of Alaska and the native tribes displaced by the influx of millions of desperate post-war immigrants.

Against this urban backdrop, hard bitten flatfoot Meyer Landsman is forced to pull himself away from his self-destructive, alcohol-fuel downward spiral when a neighbour in his flop house turns up with a ventilated skull. When the stiff turns out to be the chess prodigy turned heroin junkie son of a prominent orthodox sect leader in town, Landsman and his partner are soon drawn into an intrigue that holds the fate of the tribe in the balance.

While not as epic in scope as Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a highly entertaining read. Replete with fictional yet plausible linguistic, cultural and historical riffs of the imagination, Chabon has again delivered a thought provoking, action pack novel with real depth. I smell a movie deal.