Loved this book. Again (a theme in my reviews) I listened to it on CD, and that made all the difference. I had tried to pick it up several times before, but never got beyond the first chapter, but the book on CD had me hooked in the first few minutes. The reader, Peter Riegert, did a great job with voices and the flow of the language - particularly in dialogue. Some of the characters, like Berko Shemets, will live in my memory permanently, and the setting Sitka, Alaska in an alternate world history is thrilling, as are some of the subplots involving chess fanatics, Phillipino doughnuts and an underground tunnel system.
The only thing that lost it the final star is the plot. Set as a murder mystery, the plot gets lost in the sauce, so to speak. By the end of the book, while you know who-dun-it, there are still a number of unanswered questions, which may have been the author's intent, but which still bother me. (Did Mendel perform those miracles or were they legends? What did Elijah know, or was he just a random red herring?)

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I thought that I would never get into this book in the first few chapters, it felt like we walked into the middle of the plot and we just had to catch up. By the second half of the book I still didnt know who had done it, why the feds were shutting down the police station, and where everyone was gonna go? Of course at the end most of the questions had been answered, the killer identified and the hero I think comes to his senses. A very serious book with some humor thrown in, laughed right out loud stuff. I would recommend this book.

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