Yes, this marvelous book is set in Alaska, but it's not an Alaska that anyone would recognize. It's Sitka gone Eastern Europe, filled with Jews, saved from the holocaust and refugees from an Israel that never was. Strictly speaking, this is genre fiction -- it's really just a straight ahead hard-boiled detective story -- but the language is so magnificent, the imagined world of Sitka jews so vivid, and the characters so tender, that the genre becomes thoroughly secondary. A literary page-turner, certain not to disappoint.  (ALA243, $26.95)