The Commissioner's Rifles is a slim volume containing two short stories, both set in the world of Sutton Stern's debut novel, Robby Run. The novel introduced readers last year to Lt. Robert Chase Roebuck, a former U.S. Navy man who is coerced back into the service in 1845 and sent on a mission to South America.

This book is just 66 pages, and it does little to further Roebuck's narrative.

The first story, "The Commissioner's Rifles," is set somewhere around 1850, during the early days of the Taiping Rebellion in China. The protagonist here is Onoe, a Japanese trader who ships weapons to China and impoverished Chinese workers to Japan; he also deals in cloth goods, books and erotic art. Roebuck appears here only briefly and does not play a major role in the story -- in fact, without him, little would have changed in the final outcome.

The second story, "Death Floats Down," takes us back to Argentina in 1845; it is a chapter from Robby Run, Stern explains in a brief prologue, that was excised during the editing process. Here, Roebuck and his crew have gone upriver to stop a small convoy of boats carrying supplies from reaching their enemies.

I enjoyed Robby Run and I enjoyed these stories, too, but I'm not sure I see the point to them. It seems like Stern would have been better served waiting until he had a larger selection of stories to release as a genuine short-story anthology, rather than rushing these two stories into print by themselves.

That said, I continue to like Stern's writing, and he gives us solid plots and characters to root for, so I hope to see his next full novel -- or, heck, a book of short stories -- from him soon.