Red Coat Justice

1894. Corporal Wade Grayling of the Northwest Mounted Police is assigned to a remote region of the Yukon Territory, the region where the Commonwealth wants to build a fort. Upon his arrival, he finds a dead man hanging, the death he rightly assumes associated with a small community of Cossacks - primarily Latvians and Russians - who have set up camp nearby. Olaf, the seeming leader of the community as its primary religious figure, admits they killed the mountain man for stealing from them, his hanging dead body a warning to other wannabe thieves. Olaf and his men do not take kindly to the news of the fort being built on the land on which they've settled. In a run-in he has with other visiting Cossacks, Wade understands why they killed the man and why they do not want to move from their settlement: they have set up an economy built primarily around the opium trade, Olaf who is in charge of maintaining and harvesting the poppy crops. Wade himself has a less than forthright history with the opium trade. In learning what is going on, Wade initiates a war with Olaf and the other visiting Cossacks. In addition to shutting down the opium business, Wade has to protect the innocent, primarily Olaf's two daughters, young adult Amethyst who previously disfigured her pretty face to retain a sense of emotional security, and adolescent Cleora, who forms an attachment to their red coated protector.