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Why does a poorly clad eleven-year-old surrender to American Border Agent Peyton Cote on a March afternoon in Northern Aroostook County, Maine? Cote is on a routine US/Canada border patrol when Aleksei Vann stumbles out of the woods. Thus begins DESTINY'S PAWN, as a boy from the Ukraine seeks asylum in the United States. How in heaven's name did he get there?
Soon characters from foreign countries begin to arrive in this remote corner of the United States and a story about a painting stolen in 1990 begins to unfold. Poor Aleksei is one of destiny's pawns in this story. His American cousin Michael, a high school senior, finds the hidden painting and falls in love with it, becoming the second pawn in the story.
Aroostook County Maine in the winter, one of the coldest and most isolated places in the States, comes alive as Agent Cote snowshoes through the woods, shivers in unexpected cold rain, and huddles by her woodstove at home. Cote's heart is touched by Aleksei, as she struggles with issues with her own son Tommy. He is another pawn in destiny's cruelty to children.
The cast of characters is vast and complicated, everyone from a Russian hit man, to
a victim of Russia's takeover of the Ukraine, to an FBI team from Boston with a trigger-happy agent. The United States also looms large in the story: its obsession with the war on drugs, its fears of its neighbors, whether they are wetbacks from the South or terrorists from the North. The multiplicity of its law-enforcing agencies, even in remote Aroostook County, boggles the mind.
DESTINY'S PAWN is not a blood soaked mystery until the end when bullets fly fast and furiously. Suddenly it becomes clear that this story is very dark and that all the good guys will not survive, that some will die and others will continue to suffer. Only the painting comes out smiling.
Fortunately, the very likeable Agent Peyton Cote will live to love her family and solve more crimes on the northern border of the USA.
§ Susan Hoover is a playwright, independent producer and retired college English teacher. She lives in Nova Scotia.
Reviewed by Susan Hoover, June 2016
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