Traffic North: Crime on the Alaska - Russia Border

Traffic North: Crime on the Alaska - Russia Border
434 Pages
Self-Published via Amazon/Kindle
ISBN 9781532396922

“I’m not your usual cop,” Anchorage Detective Sasha Kulaeva admits. Since the death of her State Trooper husband in a drug bust, she’s sought balm in booze, but to little avail. And she’s turned herself into a dedicated vigilante who’s padded her job description to include extra-legal activities: judge, jury, and executioner.

Detective Kulaeva is on the case when two unrelated deaths occur: an American fisherman goes missing off of a Russian trawler working in the middle of the Bering Sea; and the body of a young woman is found in a snowy meadow north of Anchorage — a syringe buried in her rear end. Sasha gets partnered with Charlie Dana, a straight-shooting FBI agent, more boy scout than action hero. “You’ll bend the law however it suits you,” Charlie complains to her.

“Bend it. Beat it. Shake it. Break it,” she answers. For Sasha, the niceties of Miranda are impediments, the ACLU, meddlers.

The two discover that mountains of Afghani heroin are being smuggled across Russia, floated over the Bering Sea into Alaska, and ultimately wind up in the hands of Brooklyn’s Russian mafia. The cop and the fed find themselves thrown together into a contentious working relationship that simmers in Anchorage, boils over in the Aleutian Islands, and comes to an explosive conclusion in Vladivostok, on Russia’s east coast.

Richie Goldstein

About Richie Goldstein (Anchorage, Alaska Author)

Richie Goldstein

My life has been peppered with amazing events and blasted by traumatic ones. I’ve been a teacher, a farmer, a fisherman, a writer/editor, a nurse’s assistant, and a B and B owner. I’ve sold women’s shoes and men’s wallets. I’ve hawked newspapers in traffic, soda-jerked malts, and when I was thirteen, I had my first forty-hour/week job — boxing cough syrup on an assembly line for a buck an hour, while the Mexican women down the line made twenty cents less than I. The beginnings of political consciousness.

I’ve lived as both a communist and a capitalist. I’ve hitchhiked across Europe several times, been a paratrooper, raced sled dogs on the frozen tundra, and won a prestigious national prize. I’ve written and produced award winning video documentaries for Public Television. I have not run for public office, my unelectability the main problem.

I have two MAs: one in Russian Literature and one in Special Education/Gifted and Talented. It’s that second one that brought me to bush Alaska and to a life of intense romance and insane adventure. I married there and my wife and I raised our daughter and son in that boreal backwater. We now live in Anchorage, where I split my time between gardening and writing.

I’ve self-published a couple items: Traffic North: Crime on the Alaska – Russia Border is a crime thriller featuring a flawed Anchorage policewoman dealing with murder, mayhem, and the Mafia. By the end of 2020, the sequel – Alaska Transit – will be out and will feature the further adventures of our troubled cop.

Nothing Sacred is a collection of eighteen of my partly-serious, mostly absurdly humorous short stories.