During my college years, a friend studying North American archeology and I were exploring the enormity that is Forest Park in St. Louis. There we came across a strange, small plaque. Nearly covered by weeds and vines, it stated that 16 mounds were destroyed in order to build the park which would house The Louisiana Purchase Exposition and World’s Fair—and which would eventually become Forest Park. At the time of that (nearly forgotten) destruction, St. Louis was one of the most important cities in America. Situated on the Mississippi River, the city truly was the gateway to the west, and it became the first city outside Europe to host either the Olympics or a World’s Fair. By the 1910s and ‘20s, St. Louis was also one of the largest cities in the United States and had the busiest train station in the country. A version of this city is the center of an uncanny new novel.

The past is a foreign country—and in this case, a make-believe one. “In a city that never was in an America that never was” is the tagline for Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, a noir detective story set in an alternative history where the Mormon theocracy is not yet part of the United States and Red Russians are invading what we know as Alaska. Here, too, the Navajo Nation are their own state in the Union. Cahokia, the site of the largest pyramid north of Mexico, and at its height, home to nearly forty thousand souls, is the Midwest metropolis St. Louis became in our timeline and history.

We follow a pair of detectives, Joe Barrow and Phineas “Phin” Drummond, through a complex and messy murder investigation as we are introduced to this America that never was. Here an Indigenous oligarchy has always ruled over a great city that only joined the United States of its own choice, and only as lately as the Civil War. While the hereditary monarchy is gone, land is held in common by all takouma or Indigenous people. Indeed, it is on the roof of the communal land office that the grisly murder Joe and Phinn try to make sense of occurs. Our protagonist (in the mold of Sam Spade) is Joe, an Afro-Indigenous man raised in an orphanage and given PTSD by the great war (which appears to be a fairly conventional version of our WWI). And yet. One of the powerful, shadowy figures of the novel is correct when he tells Joe, “I suspect you of being a man of virtue.”

Joe Barrow is also the insider/outsider we need to guide us through this strange, old world. Cahokia is haunted by both Roman Catholic/Indigenous synchronicity and the newly arrived KKK. Joe’s indigeneity opens doors, while the fact he isn’t from Cahokia isolates him. He wants to be a jazz musician and is torn between his work with the police and a hope held out to him by former bandmates for a glitzier lifestyle, free of stray bullets. Meanwhile, white interlopers in the city dislike him for the miscegenation he represents and remind him of this often. (Interestingly, Spufford notes on in Instagram that as far as he can tell, there was only one police sergeant of color in the Midwest during the 1920-30s.)

Takata or white people are still a sort of outsider in the city of Spufford’s creation. Cahokia is sixty percent Indigenous, twenty percent white/Euroamerican, and twenty percent Black—and the city comes alive for us through Spufford’s fluid prose. Unlike many reviewers, I won’t tell you why this world is different—why Natives remain a driving force in society in this timeline. Spufford put this explanation in the afterword instead of a foreword, and I think with good reason. He wants you to work to understand this world. However, one key I will give you that I found to be a helpful resource is the author’s Instagram. It can act as a key pairing visual cues as the reader passes through the story. Here Spufford worked overtime to explain the complex references and give us pictures to help the world emerge in our minds.

While he weaves his detective tale, Spufford also powerfully shows the double mindedness of Euroamerican dealings with Natives across history. Early on, we encounter “The Man.” While the character’s real name is Sebastian Cuauhtemoc Hashi, he is never referred to in this manner. To the takouma, he is “the man of the sun.” Whites and others usually fall into calling him this or simply “The Man.” He is consistently regarded by both the KKK and interloping robber barons as a great force of power—almost otherworldly—but simultaneously as a savage whose Harvard education and powerful corporate ties are like jewelry on an ape. The Man describes for us the goal of our murder, its aesthetics, and aftermath: “What is being attempted is a repetition of the strategy that worked in Texas and in California, last century, and in Hawaii only twenty or so years ago… make sure the order that is restored conveniently wipes away native power and native property rights.” The Man continues, “All in line with the great, unspoken principle of American history… if it’s worth having, the red man shall not be allowed to keep it.” Through the lens of another America, Spufford’s story shows us precisely how horrific Indigenous dispossession is. In a prophetic timbre, we start to realize. But he does not leave us there.