concluded that it was not the victim’s real name. The victim was also a heroin addict, as evidenced by needle marks and devices. He must have been a devout Jew at some point in his past, because he used a tefillin, a leather strap attached to a box containing passages from the Torah used in prayer, as a tourniquet. Lasker was shot in the back of the head, and the killer used a pillow to muffle the sound, so Meyer concludes that it was a professional hit. Meyer has the feeling, correctly as it turns out, that the arrangement of the chess pieces is an important clue.

Meyer’s father, Isidor, and uncle Hertz Shemets were both serious chess buffs, but their attempts to teach him the game only resulted in his hating it. Hertz and his sister Freydl had arrived in Sitka in 1941 and Isidor, a survivor of a concentration camp, in 1948. Isidor and Freydl were married in 1953. Freydl worked for a local newspaper while Isidor wrote articles on chess and drew a pension from the German government. Besides Meyer, they had one daughter, Naomi, who grew up to be a bush pilot. Isidor committed suicide when Meyer was a teenager, Freydl died of cancer while Meyer was in college, and Naomi died when her plane flew into a mountain under mysterious circumstances the year before. Meyer eventually discovers a connection between Naomi and Lasker.

Hertz Shemets attended law school in Seattle after the war and then joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He eventually rose to head their counterintelligence program in Alaska but was forced into retirement because of a scandal. A newspaper reporter discovered that he had been working on a private agenda to secure permanent status for Sitka as a homeland for the Jews and had been using illegal means such as bribing and blackmailing congressmen. Years previously, Hertz had had an affair with a Native American woman, a member of the Tlingit nation whose family claimed descent from their raven god, and the result was their son, Berko, whom Hertz adopted after she died. Berko, known as Johnny “the Jew” Bear to the Tlingits, converted to Judaism, became a police officer, and married Ester-Malke Taytsh, a Jewish woman. They have two sons, and Ester-Malke is pregnant with their third child at the beginning of the book. They provide Meyer with the closest thing he has to a family, although the elder Shemets is still alive and married to another Tlingit woman.

Berko and Meyer’s relationship is reminiscent of the one between the title characters in Michael Chabon’s earlier novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). Not only are they cousins but they are also partners in their professional lives and best friends. As teenagers, Meyer was supposed to teach chess to Berko, but his hatred of the game stopped him, so Berko has little knowledge of it. Berko’s Native American ancestry also suggests a connection with Chabon’s young adult fantasy Summerland (2002).

Meyer was married to Bina Gelbfish for twelve years, and they had been dating for five years before that. They also worked in the homicide squad together for four. However, they were partners on only one case, which they failed to solve, and they aborted their only child, a boy, after the doctor informed them he might have birth defects. After their divorce, she left for a year to train as a supervisor. When she returned, she became Meyer’s boss. It makes for a complicated relationship, to say the least. Because of the impending reversion of Sitka back to Alaska, she wants Meyer to flag the Lasker investigation as a cold case. He does not so much refuse as ignore her.

The investigation leads Meyer to the Einstein Chess Club, which meets regularly at the Hotel Einstein. The players recognize the man from his picture, but to them he is known as Frank. Meyer and Berko eventually identify the victim as Mendel Shpilman. He was the estranged son of the Hasidic rabbi and organized crime boss Heskel Shpilman. Mendel was a child prodigy at chess, Torah studies, and foreign languages. Healing miracles were associated with him, so many people hoped he was the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the one man in his generation with the potential to become the Messiah. Another of his peculiarities was that his body temperature was two degrees warmer than normal. Twenty-three years previously, he angered his father when he refused to marry the nice Jewish girl his parents had chosen for him, and he disappeared. Meyer and Berko’s interview with the elder Shpilman goes badly, and they suspect the gangster already knew that Mendel was dead.

Meyer eventually discovers a conspiracy to destroy the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This is the third holiest shrine in Islam and, according to tradition, the place where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. More important, it is known to be on the site where Solomon’s Temple stood. In Judaic tradition, the temple must be rebuilt before the Messiah can come. Furthermore, according to the book of Revelation in the New Testament, the temple must be rebuilt before the second coming of Christ. The conspirators, Meyer learns, are an alliance of fundamentalist Jews and Christians. While the fundamentalist Jews are very richly characterized, the fundamentalist Christians are poorly and thinly drawn.

Some readers might be put off by the Yiddish slang, inspired by the 1958 phrase book Say It in Yiddish by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, and the jargon Chabon has invented for the novel. However, such language usually can be understood from the context. Uniformed police officers are called “latkes,” and plainclothesmen are called “nozes.” “Black Hats” refers to Hasidic Jews, who also control organized crime in Sitka, “rebbe” to rabbi, “yids” to Jews living in Sitka, “Mexicans” to Jews living in the continental United States, “shtarkers” to muscle men, and “schlossers” to contract killers. They have cell phones, which they called “shoyfers,” cigarettes are called “papiroses,” and guns “sholems.”

Despite the convoluted plot, Chabon explores the issues of identity and assimilation in a world where people are not what they seem. The most devout ones are among the most corrupt, and the sleaziest are the ones with the most integrity. Many of the Sitkaniks want to become Americans, but the most they can hope for in the coming year is a green card. Meyer is more alienated than most, because he does not believe in God, which puts him at odds with the Orthodox Jews who compose most of the Sitkaniks. The reader will also see that he will have trouble becoming an American, if that is what he is allowed and chooses to do after Sitka reverts back to the United States, because he has trouble belonging to anything.