Russian Amerika
Stoney Compton
Baen, Apr 2007, $24.00
ISBN 141652116X

In 1989, in Czarist-Russian-controlled Alaska, Naval Captain Grisha Grigorievich detests the de jure and de facto prejudice that he suffers from just because he is mixed-nationality. Officers who are less competent and had less success have been promoted before him. However, even worse in his mind is the true-blood theory of law in which a Cossack purebred can invoke Czarist control on mixed-race Russians or Native Alaskans; it galls Grisha when a lightweight uses his heritage to order him about like a slave.

Grisha learns how far his lack of status goes when he is accused and convicted of murdering a government agent. Without any chance of repudiating the accusation, he is taken to a prison labor camp with no hope of exoneration or for that matter freedom; no one escapes the internment camps. However, not long afterward, Native American Alaskan separatists attack the confinement complex freeing Grisha. The freedom lovers plead with Grisha to join their cause, but he has plans to kill those whose lies led to his incarceration.

Alternate history fans will relish this superb thriller whose basis is that Russia never sold Seward's Folly. The concept and the subsequent dominoes that occur from that opening historical alteration seem reasonable. However, what makes for a delightful thriller is the "current" time scenario as Stoney Compton interweaves the key events from the past in the present. Perhaps the best scene in the novel and one of the best of the year is the revolutionaries (insurgents?) and the Czarists battle in the cold regions where climate is a deadly weapon. This is an excellent alternate historical saga.

Harriet Klausner